ABSTRACT
This volume in honor of Bob Isaacson gives each of us a great opportunity to pay tribute to Bob, and to his influences on our science and our individual careers. It also provides us with an opportunity to summarize our current work and to consider it within a broader scientific and historical context than we are typically likely to do. That is, it gives us a reason to explore our roots. For us and our current work, some of those roots extend into the intellectual soil of the late 1960s in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At that time, Bob impressed on each of his graduate students at least two central ideas: (a) The hippocampus held the key to understanding many fundamental neurobehavioral relationships “because of its unique anatomical structure” and “because its anatomical relationships to other limbic structures, the diencephalon, and the midbrain were well known” (Isaacson, Nonneman, & Schmaltz, 1968, pp. 41–42), and (b) studying the effects of damage to the developing brain may provide insights that are difficult or impossible to obtain with similar studies using adults.
