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The ability to convert experience into memory allows us to learn from our mistakes. As we live in a constantly changing world, our memory system adapts to new conditions to choose the best behavioral strategy. Swiss neuroscientists used a mouse model to study the mechanism of storing memory in the brain and how it changes over time. Hitech+ wrote.
The scientists found that in the hippocampus, an area responsible for experiential knowledge, each individual event is recorded in parallel by at least three different groups of neurons that appear at different stages during embryonic development.
A team of scientists from the University of Basel demonstrated in mice the activation of individual memory copies and its influence on memory performance. Write EurekAlert.
The first neurons are formed during the first stages of brain development and are responsible for the long-term storage of memories. At first, the first copy of a memory is too weak to access, but over time it becomes stronger. Therefore, a person can only access this memory after it has been encoded for some time.
In contrast, a copy of the same event created by neurons that come later is fairly reliable at first but fades over time, so that if you wait long enough the brain can’t access it. Neurons born between these two extremes create more reliable but less clear memories.
The type of copy also determines how easy it is to change a memory or create a new one. Those that are stored briefly can be changed and rewritten. This means that remembering a situation shortly after it occurred activates late neurons and integrates their information into the original memory. If you remember the same event much later, early neurons fire, activating their copy, but it is no longer easy to change it.
“The dynamics of memory storage in the brain demonstrates that the brain’s plasticity underlies its enormous memory capacity,” said Vilde Kvaim, lead author of the study.
The brain’s task is to achieve a balance between remembering everything that happens and being able to flexibly adapt to change, a balance that is constantly changing. Scientists hope that one day we will fully understand what causes the brain to encode and change memories in one way or another.
New research by an international team of scientists reveal The biological basis of long-term memory. It all has to do with a molecule called KIBRA, which acts as a “glue” for other molecules, strengthening the formation of memories. It is located in the synapses responsible for memory and acts as a kind of “tag” for enzymes that strengthen these neural connections.
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