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TagMemory formation

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Sick asian senior woman fainted unconscious at the table, fall face down,elderly female patient stop breathing due to heart failure, cardiac arrest,severe arrhythmia, sudden unexpected death syndrome.

How Do Strokes, Dementia Offer Insight Into How the Brain Works?

Neurologist Andrew Knox thinks the brain may store memories is an associative scheme, where previous memories are used to build up new ones

In the podcast released last Thursday, Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks interviewed pediatric neurologist Dr. Andrew Knox from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health on “Ways the brain can break” (#220, January 5, 2023). What follows is from Part 3 of the discussion. Here’s Part 1: How our brains are — and aren’t — like computers and Part 2: What is happening when children have strokes or dementia signs? https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/Mind-Matters-220-Andrew-Knox-Episode-1.mp3 This portion begins at roughly 18:25 min. A partial transcript and notes, and Additional Resources follow. The discussion began with the question, “How does the brain store memories?” Andrew Knox: There are different schemes for storing memories, but patients with Alzheimer’s seem to have Read More ›

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Ever Wish You Had Total Recall? Ask People Who Do…

Recall of every detail of one’s past works out better for some people than for others
Just why some people can recall almost everything that happened to them is a mystery in neuroscience, in part because they are few in number. Read More ›
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Orchestra rehearsal

Memory Leans More on the Brain’s Electric Field Than on Neurons

MIT researchers compare the electric field to an orchestra conducting the neurons as players

The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT offers an interesting new model of how memories are processed in the brain. Using two macaques playing a game while their brain activities were recorded, the researchers suggest the orchestra as a model. The neurons are the players and the electric field is the conductor: As the brain strives to hold information in mind, such as the list of groceries we need to buy on the way home, a new study suggests that the most consistent and reliable representation of that information is not the electrical activity of the individual neurons involved but an overall electric field they collectively produce. Indeed, whenever neuroscientists have looked at how brains represent information in Read More ›

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senior woman with family photo on tablet pc screen

What Neuroscientists Now Know About How Memories Are Born and Die

Where, exactly are our memories? Are modern media destroying them? Could we erase them if we wanted to?

At one time, neuroscientists believed that there must be a “seat” of memory in the brain, something like a room with a door marked Memory. They settled on two structures called hippocampi, on either side of the brain’s base. The illustration shows the the hippocampus of the right hemisphere (public domain). But memories turned out to have no fixed address. Neuroscientist Matthew Cobb, author of The Idea of the Brain (2020, excerpt here), tells us, But the hippocampuses are not the site of memory storage. Rather, these brain regions are the encoders and the routes through which memory formation seems to pass. The memories that are processed by the hippocampuses seem to be distributed across distant regions of the brain. Read More ›

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Do We Actually Remember Everything?

Neuroscience evidence suggests that our real problem isn’t with remembering things but finding our memories when we need them

One of a pioneer neurosurgeon’s cases featured a patient who could, unaccountably, speak ancient Greek. The explanation was not occult but it was surely remarkable for what it shows about memory.

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