After carrying out an experiment, researchers stated on Wednesday that they now have better understanding on how memories of everyday events are formed in the brain. “The astonishing fact was that these changes were dramatic, in the sense of neurons changing from being very silent to firing a lot and that these changes occurred at the exact moment of learning”. The participants had electrodes implanted in their brain in order to clarify the source of the seizure.
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Commenting on the findings of the research, senior author of the research and professor of neurosurgery, psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA, Dr. Itzhak Fried said, ” This study goes into the heart of the neural code underlying one of the most fundamental aspects of human cognition and memory, namely the formation of associations.
This has been a long sought after idea-the trick to solving the mystery of the way the brain forms memories-and previous studies have only resulted in theories. Then they identified different neurons that responded to pictures of a particular place, like the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. With this first analysis, the team was able to find neurons that responded to one or more pictures. Researchers identified individual neurons that reacted to the pictures of celebrities like Julia Roberts, but not to places like the Eiffel Tower. Recording this activity even in a lonely cell from billions of neurons in a human brain and that in a patient in the hospital ward constitutes a technical achievement that is possible only in very few places across the globe. And that memory will forever link the person you saw with the place where you saw him. Dr, Fried also oversees a large team at UCLA that is now engaged in a multidisciplinary effort to develop both software and hardware for a neuro-prosthetic device, which may restore episodic memory function in neurological patients. The scientists then showed the participants composite images that put the people and places the patients had viewed separately in combinations, such as Clint Eastwood appearing in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. “The study suggests that the experience of learning can be traced back to changes in individual neurons in the brain”, Matias Ison from the University of Leicester said.
And if Alzheimer’s affects the same neurons that make associations, it would explain why people with Alzheimer’s can’t remember things like where they parked their auto, Fried says. And when we recall an experience, these special neurons may help us re-assemble all the relevant information, he says.
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But to date, human studies had not revealed the single-neuron underpinnings of episodic memory formation.
