How Very Brainy!

Scientists who studied how the brain stores and processes memories found that the cortex and hippocampus play a huge role.

18:49 07 July 2015

For years, neuroscientists have been trying to understand how the brain stores, processes, and retrieve information or memories. After countless research and studies, the picture is beginning to get clearer. 

Scientists from the University of Leicester got a glimpse of new memories being formed and concluded that the hippocampus, a small, looping structure in the brain, plays a huge role. Cortex, or the outer wrapping of the brain, is equally important as well. 

 

"Think of the [cortex] as a huge library and the hippocampus as its librarian," wrote the prominent Hungarian neuroscientist Gyorgy Buszaki in his 2006 book Rhythms of the Brain.

 

All our memories in the cortex are like specific books along miles of shelving; the hippocampus links them together and pull them off the shelf when you want to reminisce. 

 

Dr Aidan Horner from the University of London, explained: "And the extent to which we see that activation in the 'object' region correlates with the hippocampal response. So that suggests that it's the hippocampus that's doing the pattern completion, retrieving all these elements.

 

"It's able to act as an index, I suppose, by linking these things together - and doing it very very quickly, that's the key thing."

 

If the cortex were left to make its own connections between the fragments of a memory, he added, it would be far too slow.

 

"That's clearly not a system we want, if we're going to remember a specific event that happens once in a lifetime."