Brains keep temporary molecular records before making a lasting memory: Study

We should understand that there is a gap between experience and memory, our experiences are fleeting, but it takes hours to form a long-term memory.

By: Editorial Team | | Published: August 7, 2018 1:15 pm

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This is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. Kelsey Tyssowski from Harvard University said that the first dance of her wedding lasted exactly four minutes and 52 seconds, but she will probably remember it for decades.

She also said that neuroscientists still don’t entirely understand how her brain able to translate this less-than-five-minute experience into a lifelong memory. However, we should understand that there is a gap between experience and memory, our experiences are fleeting, but it takes hours to form a long-term memory.

According to the Coversation.com report, their recent work has been published in the journal Neuron, where she and her colleague figured out how the brain keeps temporary molecular records of transient experiences. Their finding not only helps to explain how the brain bridges the gap between experience and memory. It also allows us to read the brain’s short-term records.

To uncover how the brain keeps track of an animal’s experience, they started by asking how the brain records its electrical activity. Every experience we have, from chatting with a friend to smelling french fries, corresponds to its own unique pattern of electrical activity in the nervous system and brain. These activity patterns are defined by which neurons are active and in what way they’re active.

They have also given an example like if you are at the gym and lifting weights with your right arm, different neurons will be active than if you’re lifting with your left arm because different neurons are connected to the muscles of each arm.

The brain writes an article about each experience by turning on a specific set of genes in a specific set of neurons. The brain reads its temporary newspaper-like records to write its history books: long-term memories. When your brain stores a memory of an experience, it physically changes the connections between the neurons that the experience activated.

Now they hope that understanding the brain’s record-keeping will provide an easier way to measure brain activity in lab animals for researchers trying to figure out the correspondence between experience and brain activity. Current technologies are somewhat inefficient and can only measure activity in real time, so reading the brain’s genetic records could make these experiments more feasible.

So while molecular mind-reading in humans stays relegated to science fiction, for now, their work begins to allow scientists to read the records in the brains of lab mice. It’s a step toward understanding how the brain converts experience into electrical activity to memory.

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Published: August 7, 2018 1:15 pm

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