Understanding the mechanisms by which sensory experiences are stored is a longstanding challenge for neuroscience. Previous work has described how the activity of neurons in the sensory cortex allows rats to discriminate the physical features of an object contacted with their whiskers. But to date there is no evidence about how neurons represent the behavioral significance of tactile stimuli, or how tactile events are encoded in memory. I will review our knowledge of sensory coding in the neocortex and then describe new data fom the hippocampus. We recorded single-unit firing and local field potentials from the CA1 region of hippocampus while rats performed a tactile task. On each trial, the rat touched a plate with its whiskers and, after identifying the texture of the plate, turned to the left or right to obtain its reward. Two textures were associated with each reward location. Over one-third of the sampled neurons encoded the identity of the texture: their firing differed for the two stimuli associated with the same reward location. Over 80% of the sampled neurons encoded the behavioral significance of the contacted texture: their firing differed according to texture category, namely the reward location with which it was associated. Texture and reward location signals were present continuously, from the moment of stimulus contact through the entire period of reward collection. The local field potential power spectrum varied across the different phases of behavior, showing that signals of single-units were integrated within a sequence of different hippocampal states. The influence of context was examined by training rats to perform the same task in different positions within the room. The response of neurons to a given stimulus in the second context was independent of their response to that same stimulus in the first context. These results demonstrate that hippocampal neurons encode both spatial (reward location) and nonspatial variables (stimulus identity). Furthermore, in a given neuron the presence or strength of a spatial signal did not predict the presence or strength of a nonspatial signal. Thus, there is no apparent segregation of spatial and nonspatial information. The recruitment of the population of neurons into the representation of any two events is independent.