Scientists reveal how the brain maintains useful memories

Originally shared by Ward Plunet

Scientists reveal how the brain maintains useful memories

Researchers from the University of Toronto, Canada, have discovered a reason why we often struggle to remember the smaller details of past experiences. Writing in the journal eLife, the team found that there are specific groups of neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of a rat's brain - the region most associated with long-term memory. These neurons develop codes to help store relevant, general information from multiple experiences while, over time, losing the more irrelevant, minor details unique to each experience. The findings provide new insight into how the brain collects and stores useful knowledge about the world that can be adapted and applied to new experiences. "Memories of recent experiences are rich in incidental detail but, with time, the brain is thought to extract important information that is common across various past experiences," says Kaori Takehara-Nishiuchi, senior author and Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. "We predicted that groups of neurons in the mPFC build representations of this information over the period when long-term memory consolidation is known to take place, and that this information has a larger representation in the brain than the smaller details."
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-02-scientists-reveal-brain-memories.html#jCp