Your Memory Tree

I will praise Thee; 

for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: 

Psalm 138:14

"Humans can remember various types of information, including facts, dates, events and even intricate narratives.
"We then discovered that people don't simply recall various events

from the narratives but often summarize relatively large parts of a narrative (such as episodes) in single sentences. This gave rise to an idea that a narrative is represented in memory as a tree where nodes that are closer to the root represent an abstract summary of larger episodes."
Tsodyks and his colleagues hypothesized that a tree representing a narrative is first constructed when an individual first hears or reads a story and understands it.
---As past studies suggest that individuals comprehend the same narratives differently, then the resulting trees would have unique structures."
MedicalXpress

Brain's Superpower Nimbleness

 I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: 

Psalm 139:14

"Although working memory has very limited capacity—at any given

time, it can accommodate just four to seven pieces of information—it is essential for normal human functioning and represents what Spitzer calls a "superpower."
The team believes the importance of working memory lies in its nimbleness—its ability to transform and reformat information." 

MedicalXpress

Your Spatio-Temporal Brain Dynamics

 Thank You for making me so wonderfully complex!

Psalm 139:14

"MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have been seeking to uncover why certain images persist in people's minds, while many others fade. To do this, they set out to map the spatio-temporal brain dynamics involved in recognizing a visual image.

"We've identified a brain signature of visual memorability that

emerges around 300 milliseconds after seeing an image, 

---involving areas across the ventral occipital cortex and temporal cortex, 

---which processes information like color perception and object recognition. 

This signature indicates that highly memorable images prompt stronger and more sustained brain responses, especially in regions like the early visual cortex, which we previously underestimated in memory processing."

"These findings are exciting because they give us insight into what is happening in the brain between seeing something and saving it into memory," says Wilma Bainbridge. "The researchers here are picking up on a cortical signal that reflects what's important to remember, and what can be forgotten early on." 

MedicalXpress

Triplicate Memory Storage

 I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are Thy works; Psalm 139:14

"The memory of a specific experience is stored in multiple parallel “copies.” 

These copies are 

---kept for varying lengths of time

---modified to some extent, 

---and sometimes eventually deleted.

Professor Flavio Donato’s research group at the University’s Biozentrum found that memory development begins long before birth. 

At least three different groups of neurons in the brain’s hippocampus emerge at different stages during embryonic development. A single event is stored in parallel memory copies in all three — in triplicate, if you like.

First to arrive during development, the early-born neurons are responsible for the long-term persistence of a memory. In fact,

even though their memory copy is initially too weak for the brain to access, it becomes stronger and stronger as time passes. Also in humans, the brain might have access to such memory only some time after its encoding.
In contrast, the memory copy of the same event created by the late-born neurons is very strong at the beginning but fades over time, so that if one waits long enough, such a copy becomes inaccessible to the brain. 

In the middle ground, among neurons emerging in between the two extremes during development, a more stable copy could be observed.

The hippocampus is the seahorse-shaped inner part of the brain that plays an important role in memory and learning. There are actually two hippocampi, one on each side, but they are generally referred to as a single unit. People who have lost one or both have great difficulty forming or retaining memories.

The researchers think that the type of neuron in which a memory is stored there might relate to how easy it is for memories to change. The memories stored short-term via late-born neurons can, they say, be modified and rewritten: “This means that remembering a situation shortly after it has happened primes the late-born neurons to become active and integrate present information within the original memory.” 

But when an event is remembered after much time has passed, the memory retrieved from the  early-born neurons is hard to change.

Recalling an event soon after it occurs generally draws on those neurons that emerge late in development, which store the more malleable trace of the memory—which means that as we remember it, we can layer onto that memory trace associations with related events and ideas, and other new information. 

For example, you may learn to associate your first memory of a room with more recent experiences in that room, such as of a bad smell or painful accident. 

The different neuron populations allow us to preserve fundamental aspects of a memory over the long term, while also enabling us to adapt and incorporate new or related information we have learned about the world." 

MindMatters

MEMORY

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. Exodus 20:8,11

"What is memory?
The general consensus is that memory is a multitude of cognitive systems which allow us to store information for certain periods of time so that we can learn from our past experiences and predict the future.
Whereas retrospective memory is about remembering what happened in the past, prospective memory is about reminding yourself to do something in the future.

Without prospective memory, you would not remember to go to work in the morning and you would forget to set your alarm clock in the evening.
One way to divide up retrospective memory is in the kinds of things it stores.

Implicit memory is essentially skill memory – the ability to do a task. If your implicit memory failed, you would not be able to brush your teeth, take a shower, drive your car or ride a bike. This kind of memory shows up in our abilities, but we can’t always articulate what it is we know in words and concepts.

Declarative memory, in contrast, is either memory for facts and meaning (semantic) or memory for events (episodic). Without semantic memory, you would not understand the content of what your colleagues or friends were saying. Without episodic memory, you would struggle to recount your day later to someone else.

Working memory (WM) manipulates and stores information for

short periods of time. Talking with your colleagues, discussing a point at a meeting and planning your weekend would be entirely impossible without WM. In contrast, long-term memory (LTM) serves as a long-term storage of information. Almost all of our everyday activities depend on LTM, such as remembering our way home or how to drive a car.

We need to break the act of remembering things into its atomic parts. Those parts are: 

Encoding—the process of putting the information into your brain.
Storage—the process of keeping the information in your brain.
Retrieval—the process of getting the information out of your brain when you need it.
Encoding is a process of imprinting information into the brain. Without proper encoding, there is nothing to store and attempting to retrieve the memory later will fail. 

One way to improve encoding is simply to repeat the information more times. Scientists who study memory call these repetitions “rehearsals” of the information.

For a memory trace to become permanently established in our long-term storage systems, structural biological changes must take place in brain tissue. New connections between neurons must be

formed and firmly established.
In scientific terms, the mechanism through which recent memories become permanent memories is called ‘consolidation’. Although some consolidation occurs during wakefulness, the primary time for consolidation is sleep.

Retrieval is the mechanism of accessing information stored in memory. Successful retrieval of a memory trace hinges on its

associations with cues. A cue is anything that is connected to the memory trace (physical object, situation, time period, word, question). 

Scientists believe that memories are retrieved through the process of ‘spreading activation’. 

Once a cue is activated in the brain, the activation spreads from the cue to the target memory. A single memory trace can be connected to an infinite number of cues." 

ePocket

Your Film Editor

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Psalm 139:14

"The brain’s hippocampi may be the film editors of our lives, slicing our continuous experiences into discrete cuts that can be stored away as memories. 

That’s the idea raised by a new study that analyzed brain scan data from people watching films such as Forrest Gump.

Radvansky says “The mind is built to deal with complex events.”
While undergoing a functional MRI, 15 people watched Forrest Gump, and 253 people watched Alfred Hitchcock’s television drama Bang! You’re Dead. A separate group of 16 observers watched each of the productions and pressed buttons to indicate when they thought one event ended and another began.

With the data in hand, cognitive neuroscientists Aya Ben-Yakov and Rik Henson, both of the University of Cambridge, aligned participants’ brain activity with the transition points marked by the 16 observers. A brain structure called the hippocampus, known to be important for memory and navigation, seemed particularly active at these junctures, the team reports in the Journal of Neuroscience. When the researchers looked at hippocampus behavior over the entire shows, the brain structure was most active when the observers had indicated a shift from one event to another.
That response “was actually quite striking,” Ben-Yakov says. “I wasn’t expecting it to be this strong and this clear.”

These transitions didn’t always involve jumps to new places or times in the story. One such boundary came near the beginning of Forrest Gump as Forrest sits quietly on a bench. Suddenly, he blurts out his famous greeting: “Hello. My name’s Forrest. Forrest Gump.” The hippocampus may have helped slice that continuous bench scene into two events: before talking and after talking. Such divisions may help package information into discrete pieces that can then be stored as memories, the researchers suspect." 

ScienceNews

Brain’s GPS

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made... 

Psalm 139:14

"Emerging evidence suggests that the brain encodes abstract
knowledge in the same way that it represents positions in space, which hints at a more universal theory of cognition.

In the past few decades, research has shown that for at least two of our faculties, memory and navigation, those metaphors may have a physical basis in the brain.
--A small seahorse-shaped structure, the hippocampus, is essential to both those functions, and evidence has started to suggest that the same coding scheme — a grid-based form of representation — may underlie them.
--Recent insights have prompted some researchers to propose that this same coding scheme can help us navigate other kinds of information, including sights, sounds and abstract concepts.
--The most ambitious suggestions even venture that these grid codes could be the key to understanding how the brain processes all details of general knowledge, perception and memory.

Unlike the place cells, grid cells do not represent particular locations. Instead, they form a coordinate system that’s independent of location. (As a result, they’re popularly known as the brain’s GPS.) 

Each grid cell fires at 

regularly spaced positions,

 which form a hexagonal pattern.

*Different sets of grid cells form different grids: grids with larger or smaller hexagons, grids oriented in other directions, grids offset from one another. 

*Together, the grid cells map every spatial position in an environment, and any particular location is represented by a unique combination of grid cells’ firing patterns. 

*The single point where various grids overlap tells the brain where the body must be.

Since the grid network is based on relative relations, it could, at least in theory, represent not only a lot of information but a lot of different types of information, too." 

QuantaMagazine