• Question: how does memory actually get stored in the brain?

    Asked by xxxx to Fiona, Joanna on 25 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joanna Brooks

      Joanna Brooks answered on 25 Jun 2010:

      Hello again! Memories are stored in the brain within networks of cells – the cells are called neurons and so the networks are called ‘neuronal networks’. When you process information that means something – like a telephone number for example – this information is stored within the neural network that is responsible for numbers. Within the memory system there are lots of these networks for different types of information – from numbers to emotional past events and even future events (your friend’s birthday).

      Sometimes the network of cells gets tangled up (like hair on a hair brush) and you can’t remember anything – this is what happens in Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists are still trying to understand how these networks work in the first place and why they get tangled up.

    • Photo: Fiona Randall

      Fiona Randall answered on 25 Jun 2010:

      The majority of evidence is that memories are stored by changes in the strength of the connections between specific groups of nerve cells in the hippocampus and cortex of the brain. The connections known as synapses get either stronger or weaker and this is thought to be how memories are stored at the molecular level in cells. There is also evidence that the memory of an experience makes the same brain cells active and the same brain waves recordable as when it actually happened. Memories are thought to be laid down (known as consolidated in science terms) while we sleep and the patterns of activity recorded in the day in the same cells can be observed in sleep too and thought to be possibly how memory traces are stored. Memory is so cool I think as one little thing such as a smell or a sound can bring back a memory in extreme detail. And have you ever noticed that you remember things better if they affected you emotionally? That is because there is a part of your brain that makes your memories of emotional things, like those that made you really happy/sad/scared/etc, called the amygdala that enhances memory storage of emotional things. This is also the bit of the brain that can go wrong in illnesses like post-traumatic stress, where a memory of something awful keeps coming back and you constantly relive the experience. Normally, after a bad experience your brain learns to recognise safety in the environment and will dampen down the bad memory with time, but in post-traumatic stress every time the memory is brought back the sufferer relives the experience as if it was happening again. Really horrid. But there is so much we still need to understand about memories. This is just the tip of what we are going to still find. So interesting isn’t it 🙂

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