Memories are formed when these connections between nerve cells are strengthened in a process called Long Term Potentiation.
Short term memory is small and lasts for seconds whereas long term memory is limitless. This explains why you can remember the cake at your 7th birthday party but not the name of the person you have just met! Your short-term memory can hold between and 4 and 9 items for around 30 seconds, this has been likened to writing your name in the air with a sparkler.
There are some tricks to improve short- term memory, say for example you are trying to remember a phone number, repeating the number over and over and breaking the number down into smaller chunks can help you retain the information for longer. Some memories make it through to long term storage, new memories are created in the area of the brain called the hippocampus and over time they are moved to the outer part of the brain called the cortex where they become long term memories.
Scientists have shown that memories can form in the womb from as early as 20 weeks' gestation! Babies will remember music that was played to them in the womb! Our long-term memory has limitless capacity and can store memories indefinitely but if we were able to recall every single memory can you imagine how overwhelming that would be? We are more likely to remember something if we understand and pay attention to it, do it repeatedly or it is linked to an emotion.
Memories are strongly linked to emotions, so you are more likely to store a memory if you are experiencing a strong emotion, such as fear, happiness, sadness.
Association explains why if you have ever entered a room and forgot what you went for, but then return to the place where you first had the thought - the memory will come back to you!
Smells commonly trigger memories, often more so than any of our other senses - perfume reminding you of special times or people, the scent of pine reminding you of happy Christmas memories. This is thought to be because in the brain the hippocampus the area that creates new memories has direct connections to the olfactory bulb that is involved in our sense of smell.
As our memories are stored forever, if we have forgotten something that doesn't mean the memory isn't there any more, simply that we don't have the right cue to help us retrieve it! Not forgotten, just a failure of retrieval! The memory is like a muscle that gets stronger with exercise.
The brain has a wonderful ability to form new neural connections and to change and grow called neuro plasticity. To encode memories and move them to long term storage we have to strengthen the neural connections and this is helped by trying to remember things. The harder we have to work to retrieve a memory the more likely we are to learn, that's why testing students works for learning! Once you've started a dialogue with the sender you're in a better position to communicate more easily and maintain a strong rapport.
Just like you might add the sender to your contact list, your brain has created a 'strengthened synaptic contact. Likewise, your ability to recall and remember certain memories depends on maintaining the strength of this long-term connection between synaptic contacts. LTP acts as an Ethernet cable of sorts -- allowing your brain to upload, download and process at a higher rate -- which may explain why some memories are more vivid than others: the pathway on which you contact them performs at a faster pace.
However, it's also a muscle. You use it or you lose it. As the synapses and pathways between neurons are used, they gain the ability to become strengthened or permanently enhanced. This is the building block of how memory works. In the same vein, losing this strong LTP -- or heightened synaptic connections between neurons -- could be the reason behind cognitive loss and impairment.
Just as muscles in the body atrophy when you don't use them, the brain will deteriorate when it's not stimulated. Griffith said the argument about how memory is consolidated and retrieved is vast, and there are many aspects that still need to be studied about the phenomenon.
Kennedy, say, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Unfortunately, staggeringly terrible news seems to come out of the blue more often than staggeringly good news. But as clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate. Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him.
He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day. Nader believes he may have an explanation for such quirks of memory. His ideas are unconventional within neuroscience, and they have caused researchers to reconsider some of their most basic assumptions about how memory works.
In short, Nader believes that the very act of remembering can change our memories. Much of his research is on rats, but he says the same basic principles apply to human memory as well.
In fact, he says, it may be impossible for humans or any other animal to bring a memory to mind without altering it in some way. Memories surrounding a major event like September 11 might be especially susceptible, he says, because we tend to replay them over and over in our minds and in conversation with others—with each repetition having the potential to alter them.
For those of us who cherish our memories and like to think they are an accurate record of our history, the idea that memory is fundamentally malleable is more than a little disturbing. Not all researchers believe Nader has proved that the process of remembering itself can alter memories.
But if he is right, it may not be an entirely bad thing. It might even be possible to put the phenomenon to good use to reduce the suffering of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, who are plagued by recurring memories of events they wish they could put behind them. Nader was born in Cairo, Egypt. His Coptic Christian family faced persecution at the hands of Arab nationalists and fled to Canada in , when he was 4 years old. He attended college and graduate school at the University of Toronto, and in joined the New York University lab of Joseph LeDoux, a distinguished neuroscientist who studies how emotions influence memory.
Even the most cherished ideas in a given field are open to question. Scientists have long known that recording a memory requires adjusting the connections between neurons.
Each memory tweaks some tiny subset of the neurons in the brain the human brain has billion neurons in all , changing the way they communicate. Neurons send messages to one another across narrow gaps called synapses. How widely distributed in the brain are the cells that encode a given memory? How does our brain activity correspond to how we experience memories? These active areas of research may one day provide new insight into brain function and how to treat memory-related conditions. If so, the act of remembering something makes that memory temporarily malleable—letting it be strengthened, weakened, or otherwise altered.
Memories may be more easily targeted by medications during reconsolidation, which could help treat conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email.
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