Our Brain Stores Data Like A Computer

It’s funny that we have to make our brain work in order to be able to figure out how it’s working. Well, at least that is what neuroscientists Kaori Takehara-Nishiuchi and Bruce McNaughton formerly from the University of Arizona had to do in order to find clues about how our memory works.

We know that new memory is stored in our hippocampus, and then the data is transfered to the cortex for storage. It’s much like RAM memory and a HDD. When you first gather data from the world, it is stored in the hippocampus (our RAM), and if our brain finds that data as important, it makes copies of it on the cortex (our Hard Drive). If the data is not transferred, new data will take its place.

But this study has managed to show that one can work without the other. Rats were trained to blink when they heard a tone (a tone was played and then an electroshock was sent, the rat than reacted to the tone with a self-defence mechanism : blinking). They removed either the hippocampus or the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) at different times relating to the training in order to see how the rats will react.

When the hippocampus was removed a day after the training, the rats did not blink when the tone was played (They removed the RAM before the data was stored in the HDD), but if the hippocampus was removed a month after the training, the rats still remembered that a shock was coming and that they had to blink (they removed the RAM but the data was already in the HDD). If the medial prefrontal cortex was removed, things went exactly the opposite.

This is not a new theory, but this study gives electrophysiologial proof that this is how the memory works. But now a new question has been raised : how is this exactly made ?

Bruno Bontempi, a neuroscientist at the Université de Bordeaux in Talence, France states : “memories are progressively laid down in the cortex as they mature over time and become independent of the hippocampus,”.”A lingering question, is exactly how memories become encoded in the mPFC. Research with both rodents and people has suggested that new memories are reactivated during sleep”. “One possibility, is that this memory reactivation has a role in changing neural firing patterns and stabilizing memories in the cortex.”