Dan Schacter on the memory and the imagination.

When looking through research into imagination, memory and the brain, one name that keeps appearing is that of Dan Schacter. We recently interviewed Donna Rose Addis on this podcast, and she and Dan often collaborate on research. Dan has been a Professor of Psychology in the Psychology Department in Harvard University since 1991, focusing mainly on memory, and more recently on the relationship between memory and imagination, using techniques from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. We chatted via Skype and I started by asking him if he might firstly introduce us to the hippocampus. If he was introducing it to someone at a party, who knew nothing about it, where would he start?