The virus struck with freakish precision. The medial temporal lobes—there’s one on each side of the brain—include the hippocampus and several adjacent regions that together perform the magical feat of turning our perceptions into long-term memories. Memories aren’t actually stored in the hippocampus—they reside elsewhere, in the brain’s corrugated outer layers, the neocortex—but the hippocampal area makes them stick.
