Brain’s Mechanism of Creating Detailed and Enduring Memories Unravelled in a New Study
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:
Brain's mechanism of creating detailed and enduring memories unravelled in a new study:
The study, published in Nature Communications, highlights "inhibitory connections" in the brain, which keep the brain functioning healthy by dampening the nerve cell activity.
Memories are created when connections between the nerve cells which send and receive signals from the brain are made stronger, the media release of the study says. This prompts a response from the neighbouring nerve cells in the hippocampus - a region of the brain crucially important for memory formation - which get "stimulated" or "excited". This is where the inhibitory connections come into play. They prevent neurons from being stimulated, thereby preventing any changes and ensuring that the memory is 'stabilized', the experiment found.
[...] Apart from stabilizing memories, computational modelling showed that this inhibitory learning also enabled the hippocampus to prevent information from interfering with and disrupting memories". The findings provide insight into how humans form expectations and make near-accurate predictions about what could happen in the future.
Journal Reference:
Matt Udakis, Victor Pedrosa, Sophie E. L. Chamberlain, et al. Interneuron-specific plasticity at parvalbumin and somatostatin inhibitory synapses onto CA1 pyramidal neurons shapes hippocampal output [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18074-8)
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