The brain was able to “rotate” memories
The brain was able to “rotate” memories
Scientists from Princeton University (USA) have figured out how human memory works. They concluded that the brain “rotates” memories so as not to lose them, according to Nature Neuroscience.
Research has shown that our brains are forced to process sensations and memories at the same time.
“We must assimilate new sensory information about the world around us, while retaining short-term memories of earlier observations or events. Our ability to comprehend our surroundings, learn, act and think – all this depends on constant, rapid interactions between perception and memory, “- says the text of the scientific work.
Scientists have noted that the brain needs to sort the incoming information. If two data streams “overlap” each other, he will not be able to interpret them correctly. In this case, past memories can be distorted under the influence of new impressions.
The difficulty lies in the fact that the same areas of the brain are responsible for both perception and memory. The authors of the new study have found that the brain has a kind of “protective buffer” that helps avoid malfunctions.
As part of the experiment, they forced lab rats to listen to four-chord sequences over and over so they could remember them. In doing so, they tracked the activity of neurons.
Observations have shown that the neural representations of related chords over time began to resemble each other. But new stimuli (such as unexpected chords) can change the way a mouse thinks about what it hears – essentially overwriting its memories.
To avoid mistakes by processing current and past stimuli, the brain essentially “rotates” sensory information to encode it as memories. Neural patterns that perceive new data rotate in an orthogonal projection – in other words, they remain in the same group of neurons, but unfold perpendicularly.
Previously, scientists told how to improve memory. To do this, they conducted an experiment with snails.
