Our brain is an amazing organ which has immersed in it deep conundrum inside it. There are millions and billions of nerves and cells making the brain work. They can hold numerous emotions, they can bury some old memories which sprang up suddenly. Millions of small memories, mathematics formula, all the lines of books which we have read a some point of our life are suppressed within this amazingly mysterious organ of our body. Most importantly, a brain can create memory. This truth surpasses all computers, all super-computers and all big technologies.
Now in this topic, we shall throw some light on memory formation in brain and its importance. The brain has a part called the middle temporal lobe which is responsible for the memory formation from real life events. Once a minute issue is met with this part of the brain, the person loses his/her memory, gets victim of several scaring diseases like Alzheimer’s disease. Sudden trauma can also cause damage and consequently diseases like traumatic brain injury, or epilepsy.
Matias Ison from University of Leicester in Britain. is working on this topic. He said, “It was impressive to see how individual neurons signaled the learning of new contextual associations between people and places and that the changes in firing could occur just after one instance.” He also added, “This was also compatible with basic mechanisms underlying episodic memory formation.”
Memory formation from real incidents require super fast change of the neurons which in medical term is known as single-neuron interpinnings of episodic memory formation. This very finding remained un-discovered for a long time. In order to observe the phenomenon, researchers carried out an experiment with the brains of epileptic patients. The scientists tracked down the activity of more than 600 individual neurons using electrodes implanted in the medial temporal lobe of 14 epileptic patients suffering from severe epilepsy.
When some pictures were shown to them, they could identify pictures of people, such as family members and famous actors and athletes, and places etc. Later on, they were shown some more pictures. Those pictures composed of people they have known or met before and places. The patients could figure out an association between different objects of the composite picture.
The next step will be to study how the long term memories are formed within their brain. The experiment and the study is in progress and we shall update more information very soon.
