We all suffer occasional lapses in memory. Some people suffer severe neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer's, that rob them of their ability to form memories or remember recent events.
Three new studies shed light on the way the brain forms, stores and retrieves memories. Experts say they could have implications for people with certain mental disorders.
Newly born brain cells, thousands of which are generated each day, help "time stamp" memories, according to a computer simulation by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and the University of Queensland in Australia. The research was published in the journal Neuron.
These cells do not record an exact, absolute date -- such as January 28, 2009 -- but instead encode memories that occur around the same time similarly. In this way, the mind knows whether a memory happened before, after or alongside something else.
Neuroscientists believe that if the same neurons are active during two events, a memory linking the two may be formed.
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Follow the link and learn how memories form, fade, and persist over time.
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- unimatrix0
- added this
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I always find memories in music. Say, The Beatles during childhood, old Bowie or Rundgren in high school, or The Shins on my last rip to Seattle. I can play a song and go right back to that particular memory.
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dam ur old lol
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I hope they do alot of research on this. I have a Swiss cheese memory.
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- arcticspirit
- 10 months ago
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Smells always bring back very vivid memories for me.
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- quixotic12
- 10 months ago
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Memory is such a nebulous thing. I have a hard time conceptualizing memory being "stored" in the brain.
However, memories being stored in relation to other memories makes perfect sense, and strikes me as being intuitive.
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- unimatrix0
- 10 months ago
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glad to know we're growing brain cells - I've been killing enough of them!
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- heavenriots
- 10 months ago
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I find this interesting, our minds work with many different systems. This is just a bit of the referencing system. Our minds work much like a search engine. We tag information weather we knowing do it or not. This is why many people will recall strange things at strange times. Throughout the day we tag and look up millions of things. I am sure more. If we scan a room we are looking up everything in that room.
If I say "TV" we reference to "television" and to tons of other things. Even things we do sub-consciously are tags and referenced. It is not just time its everything. Everything references everything.
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I always associate a memory with a particular thing. Seeing a Pinto reminds me of the Star Trek TNG Episode "Role Models"
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smells and sounds set off certain memories for me, strong.
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- krush_productions
- 10 months ago
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The human mind CAN be such an amazing place! To think (pun intended) that Stephen Hawking's mind can produce such briliiant intuitive leaps is beautiful and yet the same kind of human organism wasting away in prison for rape and murder seems to have a mind that operates on a level somewhere beneath the average animal predator. Imagine the differences in the "date-stamped" memories between those two different kinds of individuals... One looking back at the time when he first began to grasp concepts that elude the understanding of most of humanity and the other looking back to the first of his many victims... Like, WHOA, dude!
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Too bad we cant go down to Best Buy and just add some RAM or something. Wouldnt that be nice!
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- WhippieWoHo
- 10 months ago
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I think smell is what provokes my memories. I also have weird random dates shoved into my head like getting a haircut on feb 9th 1997 before the eigth grade dance???? Other days, and since motherhood, I can not remember what I was doing five seconds ago. haha.
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May I be excused? My brain is full...(Gary Larson)
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- Packleader_1
- 10 months ago
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