Image: Dan Saelinger; DOMINIQUE BAYNES (prop styling)
In Brief
- For decades neuroscientists have debated how memories are stored. That debate continues today, with competing theories—one of which suggests that single neurons hold the recollection, say, of your grandmother or of a famous movie star.
- The alternative theory asserts that each memory is distributed across many millions of neurons. A number of recent experiments during brain surgeries provide evidence that relatively small sets of neurons in specific regions are involved with the encoding of memories.
- At the same time, these small groupings of cells may represent many instances of one thing; a visual image of Grandma's face or her entire body—even a front and side view or the voice of a Hollywood star such as Jennifer Aniston.
More In This Article
Once a brilliant Russian Neurosurgeon named Akakhi Akakhievitch had a patient who wanted to forget his overbearing, impossible mother.
Eager to oblige, Akakhievitch opened up the patient's brain and, one by one, ablated several thousand neurons, each of which related to the concept of his mother. When the patient woke up from anesthesia, he had lost all notion of his mother. All memories of her, good and bad, were gone. Jubilant with his success, Akakhievitch turned his attention to the next endeavor—the search for cells linked to the memory of “grandmother.”
This article was originally published with the title Brain Cells for Grandmother.
Subscribe
Buy This Issue
Already a Digital subscriber? Sign-in Now
If your institution has site license access, enter here.
Already a Digital subscriber? Sign-in Now
If your institution has site license access, enter here.
See what we're tweeting about
1 Comments
Add CommentIMO, long term memories are stored as shared composite 'snippets' of sensory derived information, linked together to form specific memories.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis method reduces the total virtual storage space required to store all memories, as common snippets are shared by many memories.
This may in part explain the dream experience, as seemingly unrelated existing memory snippets are recalled and modified if necessary, to best represent the revised collection of memories it now serves, as new memories are migrated from short term to long term memory during periods of inactivity ('downtime').
This may also explain why perception and memory degrade when sleep is deprived, as experiences cannot be quickly stored in short term memory since it's likely full. This likely degrades all memory related task performance.
This may explain why the accuracy of memories degrades over time, as component snippets are slightly altered over time to accommodate new memories.
I submit this conjecture based on decades of practical experience with information system designs, as an efficient and effective reference model producing demonstrated properties of human memory.
As to how memories are physically stored, the location of linked snippets may be spatially distributed, but snippet storage is likely localized to optimize recall performance, but I doubt they can be represented by a single cell. Snippets could be stored redundantly to reduce susceptibility to physical storage media damage.