Here's one you can add to your next Zoom quiz night questions...

Yesterday a client with an enquiring mind asked me why the hippocampus is named as such, given that we both knew that 'hippo' has its roots in the Greek word for horse (e.g. a hippopotamus is a water horse, a hippodrome is a horse racing circuit).

We talk about the hippocampus in our sessions because it is part of the primitive mind - the mind many of us are inhabiting a lot of the time at the moment. The hippocampus is where we store previous emotional and behavioural patterns, including the inappropriate and unwanted ones.

Anyway, I had to look it up and I am loving the answer!

Hippocampus literally means: Horse-like sea monster. This creature pulled Poseidon's chariot in Greek mythology.

What? Do we have a horse-like sea monster in our brains?!

Nope.

The pretty and delicate marine fish we call the 'seahorse' was bestowed the name 'hippocampus' in the 1500s. Around the same time, a pioneering surgeon and anatomist dissected a human brain and declared that one section looked like a seahorse and so labelled it the hippocampus.

There ensued a couple of hundred years of debate as to what else it looked like (dolphin, silk worm, ram's horn) but by the mid 1700s the label of hippocampus had stuck.

So I'm looking forward to sharing the answer with my client the next time I see them, and I can feel a lovely analogy brewing about training our seahorses...