How the Brain Stores Memories

Imagine you had a tiny device inside your brain that could see the moment a
new memory was formed.
What would it record?
Since the brain is made up of neurons linked together in a vast network, it seems
reasonable to suppose that some part of that network would activate when you,
say, saw your first child being born.
But how big a network?
Is that memory contained in a handful of neurons or is it distributed widely
across the network?
Fascinating clues come from a new study of nine patients who had had
electrodes implanted in their brains to help monitor their seizures (Wixted et al.,
2014).
These electrodes can monitor the activity of single neurons in the brain.
With their permission, neuroscientists took advantage of this window into the
electrical activity of the brain to examine how memories are laid down and
recalled.
A small network
For the test, participants simply learned a series of words, then were presented
with another list which contained some words theyd learned along with some
new ones.
They were asked to say which ones theyd seen before.
The results amazed the studys first author John T. Wixted:
Intuitively, one might expect to find that any neuron that responds to one item
from the list would also respond to the other items from the list, but our results
did not look anything like that.
The amazing thing about these counterintuitive findings is that they could not be
more in line with what influential neurocomputational theorists long ago
predicted must be true.
As expected, the memory was encoded in the hippocampus, an area of the brain
that is vital for memory.
What they saw was that the memory for a single word was encoded across
hundreds of thousands of neurons in a distributed network.
While this may sound like a lot, its actually only a small fraction: the number of
neurons firing in response to a single word was about 2% of those in the
hippocampus.
Inside your brain
So, if you could look inside your own brain when a new memory is formed, what
youd see is that a relatively small network of neurons in the hippocampus jumps
into action.
When you recall a memory, that same network leaps into action again.
The studys authors explain:
[This is]a sparse distributed coding scheme in which each memory is coded by
the activity of a small proportion of hippocampal neurons, and each neuron
contributes to the representation of only a few memories. (Wixted et al., 2014).
Some have theorised that this is the most efficient way for the brain to work
because:
If memories were localised to individual neurons then they could easily be lost if
those particular neurons died.
If memories were too widely spread across the network, memories would be too
easily overwritten or confused.
One of the studys authors, Dr. Peter N. Steinmetz commented:
To really understand how the brain represents memory, we must understand
how memory is represented by the fundamental computational units of the brain
single neurons and their networks.
Knowing the mechanism of memory storage and retrieval is a critical step in
understanding how to better treat the dementing illnesses affecting our growing
elderly population.