How do memories work

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Who we are. NHS partners. Download our app. Home what we treat mental health articles how does your memory work. By Dr Helen Garr How does your memory work?

What are your earliest memories - your happy and sad memories? In this blog, I'll explain: How are memories made? How are memories stored? How can we improve our memory? How smartphones are affecting our memories Keep up with some of the other amazing body facts we've been sharing on Instagram and Facebook. How are memories made? In simple terms, it comes down to electrical pathways and chemicals!

What's your earliest memory? Did you know it is thought to take around milliseconds to access a long-term memory? Top tips to improve your memory Don't cram! Sleep Getting a good night's sleep is vital to help consolidate memories and is one of the most important elements in improving memory storage and retrieval.

Researchers think that the human brain might operate in a similar way. Studies of people with exceptional autobiographical memories or with impaired ones seem to bear this out. People with a condition known as highly superior autobiographical memory HSAM remember their lives in such incredible detail that they can describe the outfit that they were wearing on any particular day.

Those with severely deficient autobiographical memory SDAM , however, are unable to vividly recall specific events in their lives. As a result, they also have trouble imagining what might happen in the future. The integration of new neurons green into the hippocampus red bands degrades stored memories.

Credit: Jagroop Dhaliwal. Various symptoms of these conditions — including flashbacks, obsessive thoughts, depressive rumination and difficulty controlling thoughts — have been linked to an overactive hippocampus. A better understanding of how to help people make traumatic memories less intrusive could help researchers to treat some of the most intractable cases. When Anderson and his colleagues looked at what happens when volunteers suppress unwanted memories — a process he calls motivated forgetting — they found that people who reported more traumatic experiences were particularly good at repressing specific memories 5.

Understanding the cognitive psychology that underlies that ability, as well as the mental resilience that is necessary for developing it, could help to improve treatment for PTSD. If forgetting is truly a well-regulated, innate part of the memory process, he says, it makes sense that dysregulation of that process could have negative effects.

More from Nature Outlooks. That question is yet to be answered. But more memory researchers are shifting their focus to examine how the brain forgets, as well as how it remembers. In the past decade, researchers have begun to view forgetting as an important part of a whole. Memory, first and foremost, is there to serve an adaptive purpose. It endows us with knowledge about the world, and then updates that knowledge.

This article is part of Nature Outlook: The brain , an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content. Berry, J. Neuron 74 , — PubMed Article Google Scholar. Migues, P. Akers, K. Science , — Schmitz, T. Nature Commun. Hulbert, J. Download references.

Technology Feature 09 NOV Research Highlight 29 OCT Article 10 NOV News 04 NOV Research Highlight 03 NOV News 22 OCT Those are your procedural memories at work. Nondeclarative memories also can shape your body's unthinking responses, like salivating at the sight of your favorite food or tensing up when you see something you fear.

In general, declarative memories are easier to form than nondeclarative memories. It takes less time to memorize a country's capital than it does to learn how to play the violin. But nondeclarative memories stick around more easily. Once you've learned to ride a bicycle, you're not likely to forget.

To understand how we remember things, it's incredibly helpful to study how we forget— which is why neuroscientists study amnesia, the loss of memories or the ability to learn. Amnesia is usually the result of some kind of trauma to the brain, such as a head injury, a stroke, a brain tumor, or chronic alcoholism. There are two main types of amnesia. The first, retrograde amnesia, occurs where you forget things you knew before the brain trauma. Anterograde amnesia is when brain trauma curtails or stops someone's ability to form new memories.

The most famous case study of anterograde amnesia is Henry Molaison , who in had parts of his brain removed as a last-ditch treatment for severe seizures. While Molaison—known when he was alive as H. People who worked with him for decades had to re-introduce themselves with every visit.

By studying people such as H. It seems that short-term and long-term memories don't form in exactly the same way, nor do declarative and procedural memories. There's no one place within the brain that holds all of your memories; different areas of the brain form and store different kinds of memories, and different processes may be at play for each.

For instance, emotional responses such as fear reside in a brain region called the amygdala. Memories of the skills you've learned are associated with a different region called the striatum. A region called the hippocampus is crucial for forming, retaining, and recalling declarative memories.

The temporal lobes, the brain regions that H. Since the s scientists have surmised that memories are held within groups of neurons, or nerve cells, called cell assemblies. Those interconnected cells fire as a group in response to a specific stimulus, whether it's your friend's face or the smell of freshly baked bread.

The more the neurons fire together, the more the cells' interconnections strengthen. That way, when a future stimulus triggers the cells, it's more likely that the whole assembly fires. The nerves' collective activity transcribes what we experience as a memory. Scientists are still working through the details of how it works. For a short-term memory to become a long-term memory, it must be strengthened for long-term storage, a process called memory consolidation.

Consolidation is thought to take place by several processes. One, called long-term potentiation, consists of individual nerves modifying themselves to grow and talk to their neighboring nerves differently.