The hippocampus, a region buried deep within the folds and grooves of the brain, is the critical gatekeeper that transforms memories from short-lived to long-term. In dogged pursuit, Dr. Theodore Berger spent most of the last 35 years trying to understand how neurons in the hippocampus accomplish this complicated feat. At its heart, a memory is a series of electrical pulses that occur over time that are generated by a given number of neurons, said Berger. This is important — it suggests that we can reduce it to mathematical equations and put it into a computational framework.