Discover how the brain creates memories

Researchers have discovered exactly how our brains make memories at the cellular level. This breakthrough helps us better understand the brain's memory mechanism, as well as being expected to pave the way for the birth of new treatments for degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or epilepsy.

Dr. Peter N. Steinmetz, director of the neuroscience application program at Barrow Neurology Institute (USA), said: "To really understand how the brain expresses memory, we need to know. How the memory is interpreted by the basic computing units of the brain - individual neurons - and their system - Understanding the storage mechanism and retrieving memories is a critical step weak in understanding how to better treat mental retardation diseases affecting older people ".

According to a research report published in PNAS, Steinmetz and his colleagues discovered that the human brain locks up periodic memories in the hippocampus, attaching each memory to a package. Featured individual cells.

A human neuron is forming a photoluminescent prefix (actin) to respond to stimulation when a memory is stored.Photo: Alamy)

The conclusion was drawn after the team evaluated 9 patients with epilepsy who had implanted electrodes in the brain to control seizures. Every single neuron level activity is also recorded.

The patients were asked to remember a list of words displayed on the computer screen, then observe a second, longer list containing both those words and new words. They were asked to identify the words they had originally seen to see how well they remembered them.

The difference observed in cell-derived activity between the words that appear in the first list and the words that are not on the list clearly shows that the cells in the hippocampus represent the memories of the diseases. multiply the words.

The team discovered that the newly observed words were stored in a hippocampus-wide distribution, in which a small fraction of the cells (about 2%) responded to any word and a small amount from ( about 3%) made a drastic change in the way flashes were seen in these cells. This contrasts with the notion that any nerve cell responding to a word on the list will also react to other words.

Although only a small part of the neurons in the hippocampus region are involved in coding recent memories of any word, but according to scientists, the exact number of cells responsible for remembering each word is very big, can reach hundreds of thousands of individuals. Therefore, the loss of any single cell does not significantly affect a person's ability to remember certain words, recently seen.