Brain makes two memories for the price of one

[Guest realmayo]

For anyone trying to work out how to remember more vocabulary ...

... I don't think this will help! But anyway:

 

From http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39518580

 

... The brain "doubles up" by simultaneously making two memories of events. One is for the here-and-now and the other for a lifetime. It had been thought that all memories start as a short-term memory and are then slowly converted into a long-term one. Experts said the findings were surprising, but also beautiful and convincing.

...

The prevailing idea was that memories are formed in the hippocampus and then moved to the cortex where they are "banked". The results, published in the journal Science, showed that memories were formed simultaneously in the hippocampus and the cortex.

 

Prof Susumu Tonegawa, the director of the research centre, said: "This was surprising." He told the BBC News website: "This is contrary to the popular hypothesis that has been held for decades. "This is a significant advance compared to previous knowledge, it's a big shift."

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The experiments had to be performed on mice, but are thought to apply to human brains too.

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The mice do not seem to use the cortex's long-term memory in the first few days after it is formed. They forgot the shock event when scientists turned off the short-term memory in the hippocampus. However, they could then make the mice remember by manually switching the long-term memory on (so it was definitely there). "It is immature or silent for the first several days after formation," Prof Tonegawa said.

 

 

[Guest realmayo]

Better article here actually: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-04-neuroscientists-brain-circuit-memory-formation.html