2008 Woodie Awards
Imaging study shows how brain remembers details of life
Issue date: 4/3/08
New research from a group at Hopkins has pinpointed the area of the brain that allows us to detect subtle differences in our environment and store that information in our memory.
The study, authored by Craig Stark of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and published last week in Science, helps elucidate the neural processing that goes into declarative memory, the aspect of human memory that allows us to remember everything from the capital of Bolivia to our first day of school.
Current theories of how declarative memory works suggest that two opposing but complementary processes take place in the brain. One involves the recognition or "completion" of patterns: You can equate two similar environmental cues, even though they may not be entirely identical.
Imagine looking at your mother's face from different angles or in different lighting. You're still able to identify that particular combination of eyes, nose and mouth as "mom," despite variation in shadow and perspective.
The second process is called pattern separation. This involves dissociating two similar (but not identical) events or images.
"We need to be able to separate events in our mind and not do completion. Where did I park my car today? I need to be able to have today isolated from yesterday, the day before, last week, and so on, so that I can go to the right spot," Stark said.
In that sense, pattern separation allows us to notice small changes in our environment, a process that's arguably been fundamental to our success as a species.
"Another example is that we need to learn the names of people we meet," Stark added. "Sometimes the person looks very unique and this isn't a challenge. But other times they're not. Two brothers, for example: Internally, we need to separate our representations of the two people so that we can learn things about one without having it spill over onto another."
A host of recent research has shown fairly conclusively that a brain area called the hippocampus is where all this completion and separation takes place. Researchers have known for decades that the hippocampus is critical to creating new memories, but a step-by-step timeline of memory formation has remained elusive.
The study, authored by Craig Stark of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and published last week in Science, helps elucidate the neural processing that goes into declarative memory, the aspect of human memory that allows us to remember everything from the capital of Bolivia to our first day of school.
Current theories of how declarative memory works suggest that two opposing but complementary processes take place in the brain. One involves the recognition or "completion" of patterns: You can equate two similar environmental cues, even though they may not be entirely identical.
Imagine looking at your mother's face from different angles or in different lighting. You're still able to identify that particular combination of eyes, nose and mouth as "mom," despite variation in shadow and perspective.
The second process is called pattern separation. This involves dissociating two similar (but not identical) events or images.
"We need to be able to separate events in our mind and not do completion. Where did I park my car today? I need to be able to have today isolated from yesterday, the day before, last week, and so on, so that I can go to the right spot," Stark said.
In that sense, pattern separation allows us to notice small changes in our environment, a process that's arguably been fundamental to our success as a species.
"Another example is that we need to learn the names of people we meet," Stark added. "Sometimes the person looks very unique and this isn't a challenge. But other times they're not. Two brothers, for example: Internally, we need to separate our representations of the two people so that we can learn things about one without having it spill over onto another."
A host of recent research has shown fairly conclusively that a brain area called the hippocampus is where all this completion and separation takes place. Researchers have known for decades that the hippocampus is critical to creating new memories, but a step-by-step timeline of memory formation has remained elusive.
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