One recent study found that at the moment when patients recalled newly formed memories, ripples of nerve activity in the medial temporal lobe synced up with ripples in the brain's cortex. Many mysteries of memory remain.
How precisely are memories encoded within groups of neurons? How widely distributed in the brain are the cells that encode a given memory? How does our brain activity correspond to how we experience memories? These active areas of research may one day provide new insight into brain function and how to treat memory-related conditions.
If so, the act of remembering something makes that memory temporarily malleable—letting it be strengthened, weakened, or otherwise altered. Memories may be more easily targeted by medications during reconsolidation, which could help treat conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
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Weaver, J. Why some memories stick. Nature Download citation. Published : 09 September Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative.
Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Download PDF. Subjects Learning and memory Neural patterning. Repetitive neural responses may enhance recall of faces and words. Why the 'peculiar' stands out in our memory. Retrieved November 12, from www. For example, to find lost keys, one must first remember whether the keys were left in the kitchen or the New research shows for the first This, for example, allows you to find your car even though you parked it in a different spot the previous day, and ScienceDaily shares links with sites in the TrendMD network and earns revenue from third-party advertisers, where indicated.
Print Email Share. Boy or Girl? Just a Game? The activation of multiple neurons around one experience in this way, they found, is linked to repetition, or practice. To come to this conclusion, they studied the neural activity of mice when remembering a new place. Put in a straight enclosure with white walls marked with symbols and sugar water a mouse treat at either end, while they explored the enclosure, the researchers measured the activity of specific neurons in their hippocampus, a part of the brain known for spatial recognition and the formation of new memories Malewar: They noticed that, when first placed on the track and unsure of what to do, single neurons were activated whenever the mice took notice of symbols on the wall.
However, over time, as the mice become more familiar with the symbols and associated them to the locations of the sugar water, more and more neurons were activated in synchrony upon noticing each symbol on the wall, indicating that the mice were able to recognise their position relative to each symbol. Then withholding the mice from the enclosure for 20 days to measure their long-term memory, the researchers found that mice who had formed memories encoded by high numbers of neurons remembered the task more quickly than those whose memories formed from fewer neurons.
With the activation of higher numbers of neurons around a task associated with stronger memories, these findings suggest that memories may fade more rapidly as we age as they may encode fewer neurons. This means that, should any of these few encoded neurons fail, the memory would be lost California Institute of Technology: However, it seems that increased activation of multiple neurons may not just come from repeated actions. In biological terms, this boils down to the reactivation or replay of the neuronal activity patterns associated with a certain experience.
This replay occurs in hippocampal-cortical brain networks during rest or sleep Flanders Institute for Biotechnology: Although the researchers had not specifically measured for neuronal activity, it is likely that, just as repeating certain actions leads to higher activation of neurons associated with a given task, so does mental simulation, thus leading to stronger memory recall in the long run. While repeating actions and experiences tends to make certain events more memorable, research has also found that highly demanding and rewarding experiences tend to yield stronger memories thanks to our habit of mentally replaying them, and thus consolidating them, in our minds.
Gonzalez, Walter G.
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