Washington, D.C. ? A common cause of amnesia also prevents its victims from imagining the future, forcing them to live only in the present, researchers report in today’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, studied people with damage to the hippocampus, part of the brain that is crucial in learning and memory.

While damage to the hippocampus long has been known to cause amnesia, the team led by Dr. Eleanor Maguire wondered if there were other effects.

So they asked the patients to imagine and describe plausible situations in such locations as the beach, a bar or in the forest. They also asked them to imagine a future meeting with a friend or a Christmas party.

“We found that the role played by the hippocampus in processing memory was far broader than merely reliving past experiences,” Maguire said in a statement. “It also seems to support the ability to imagine any kind of experience including possible future events.”