• Question: how do we store and retrieve memories?

    Asked by serreg to Sallie on 29 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Sallie Baxendale

      Sallie Baxendale answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      Good question – it’s quite a complicated process and different for different kinds of memories.
      So the memory of what you did last weekend is stored in a different way to remembering French vocabulary or science diagrams or how to ride a bicycle.
      If you damage part of your brain called the hippocampus you can’t store ANY new memories at all. This means that people can’t even remember what they had for lunch!
      When we store memories they change over time and its easy to make people mis-remember things too. Memories aren’t like video’s stored away that we can play. They change all the time and are MUCH much more unreliable than we think they are. That’s why two different people often remember the same event as completely different years later.

Comments

  • Photo: Jonathan

    Jonathan commented on :

    We don’t know much about this. It’s something to do with making proteins, something to with electrical activity, and something to do with changing the ways nerves are connected in our brains.

    I’d really like to see a good explanation of this in my lifetime, but I wouldn’t bet on it.