Jonathan Wilhoite Blog: A Clock In The Brain Is What Keeps Your Memories Ticking

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

A Clock In The Brain Is What Keeps Your Memories Ticking

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Scientists believe that what keeps your memories ticking is a naturally-occurring complex mental process that takes place in the brain to allow you to develop memories that helps you establish awareness of where you have been, where you currently are and where you may be headed to.

So, What Keeps Your Memories Ticking?

In a study published recently in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan claims they have unlocked the secret on how neurons that represent space stay in time with test mice in controlled laboratory experiments.

Researchers claim that the neurons in the brain require properly-timed waves of activity in order to organize memories across time. This takes place in the memory center of the brain called the hippocampus where temporal ordering of the neural codes are organized to build a mental map.

They observed that when a test mouse is navigating through an environment, the central hippocampal area called the CA1 rely on a series of rhythmic waves from neural inputs coming from nearby brain areas that produce an updated map of space. When the inputs from a hippocampal region called the CA3 were turned off by researchers, the mice seemed to get confused with their ‘mental’ map and took more time navigating through the environment.

In order to accomplish this neuron switching, study author Thomas McHugh together with study co-author Steven Middleton said that they genetically engineered the mice to express a nerve toxin in the CA3 region to shut down the junction to other areas of the brain. They were able to note that neural activity was still processing, except that they were more capable of measuring the impact of CA3 input on the space map as they successfully muted the synaptic communication.

“Without input from CA3, there was no global organization of the neural signals across the theta cycle to define where the mouse came from or where it was going,” said McHugh.

When the discovery of the mental space map in the hippocampus was recognized back in 2014, the brain’s circuitry responsible for memory processing and updating still remained a mystery, but with the recent discovery, it gives a thorough understanding of how the brain functions and how memory data is processed and updated.

With these breakthroughs that help you understand what keeps your memories ticking may well be good references for future studies that can help better understand treatment and prevention approaches to degenerative diseases of the brain, among others.

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