Okay, so the memories get shipped out to the neocortex.
In the case of semantic memory, that's where it stays.
It never has to go back to the hippocampus.
It is stored in the neocortex and that's all it takes.
So if you lose your hippocampus, you do not lose your old semantic memories.
And this was really well illustrated
by the account of Jill Bolte Taylor.
She is and was a neuroscientist and
she had a hemorrhagic stroke in the middle of a post-doctoral
fellowship that she was on, and she recovered remarkably.
She recovered so much that she was able to actually write this book which
tells talks about her amazing journey back from completely being debilitated.
And she not only wrote the book, but
she narrated the audio book in a delightful way, which is what I listen to.