How Your Brain Remembers

Can you remember what you had for dinner last night? How do you do it?byAlzheimer's Reading RoomThe temporal lobe,which contains the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex are important to episodic memory. This enables us to learn new information andremember recent events.The hippocampus is one of the first brain structures damaged in Alzheimer's disease.How Alzheimer's Affects the 4 Memory Systems of the BrainSubscribe to the Alzheimer's Reading - This is a Free Service - Join NowHow Your Brain Remembers What You Had for Dinner Last NightUC San Diego researchers find small sets of hippocampal neurons activate for each episodic memoryConfirming earlier computational models, researchers at University of California San Diego and UC San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues in Arizona and Louisiana, report that episodic memories are encoded in the hippocampus of the human brain by distinct, sparse sets of neurons.Episodic memories are recollections of past events that occurred at a particular time and place, a sort of mental time travel to recall, for example, a past birthday party or conversation with a friend.Encoding of episodic memories occurs in the hippocampus — a pair of small, seahorse-shaped regions located deep within the central portion of the brain — but the precise mechanism and numbers of neurons involved has been unclear.“Scientists are interested in these issues not only because of their implications for models of memory, but also for health-related rea...
Source: Alzheimer's Reading Room, The - Category: Neurology Tags: brain memory memory systems of the brain remember research Source Type: blogs