Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Want to know how your brain works? It files away important memories.

Brain caught 'filing' memories during rest

Study supervisor, Dr Caswell Barry (UCL Cell & Developmental Biology), said: "This is the first time we've seen coordinated replay between two areas of the brain known to be important for memory, suggesting a filing of memories from one area to another. The hippocampus constantly absorbs information but it seems it can't store everything so replays the important memories for long term storage and transfers them to the entorhinal cortex, and possibly on to other areas of the brain, for safe-keeping and easy access."

The response of the place cells showed that the rats re-ran the track in their minds as they rested but did so at speeds 10-20 times faster than they experienced in reality. The same replay happened almost simultaneously, with a 10 millisecond delay, in grid cells located in a different part of the brain, suggesting that the rats' memories transferred from one part of the brain to another.

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Stephanie Hulse, Greenpeace Canada <stephanie.hulse@greenpeace.ca>

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