• Question: are your memory's stored in different pieces that go together when you think about them

    Asked by anon-188123 to Warren, Shanti, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 13 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Hey,

      That’s a very good question! There are many areas in the brain that are involved in storing memories – about what happened to us (episodic memory), but also knowledge about things in the world (semantic memory), like what makes a cat a cat. However, there are some areas that are more involved in the process of learning. Here the most important are amygdala, hippocampus and cerebellum. Amygdala is traditionally thought to be involved in memory for negative events etc., however, these days we know it is important for encoding any events or objects that carry information important to our well-being or survivals – so both about threatening things as well as about what objects are associated with rewards. Hippocampus (and parts of neocortiex around it like perirhinal cortex) – is responsible for forming new conscious, complex memories that underlie us remembering especially what has happened in the past (episodic memory). What is quite cool is that the cerebellum, (“little brain”), a structure located at the back of the brain, is important as well for memory – we used to believe that its main role is memory for movements (procedural memory) like the skill of driving, but we now know it is important for learning sequences of bits of information and generally these days we are discovering its role in memory is stronger than we originally thought! Then there’s also prefrontal cortex that has been traditionally associated with short – term memory. Have a look for a nice summary here – https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wsu-sandbox/chapter/parts-of-the-brain-involved-with-memory/

    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 13 Nov 2018: last edited 13 Nov 2018 3:56 pm

      Hi thanks for the question, and Paul’s answer above is very good. Just to give my own take on your question I would add your brain is generally interested in your future survival, and to do this it likes storing memories that are both relevant and useful. To do this sometimes the brain converts one memory type into a different form. The example I usually pick is breakfast, you might remember exactly what you had for breakfast this morning, this is called episodic memory. However, it might not be useful to remember these details indefinitely (i.e. what you had for breakfast Tuesday three months ago!). What our brain will often do is merge episodic memories with something called semantic memory (your memory of concepts, such as what a breakfast is). This way you get to keep your concept of a breakfast updated while losing the irrelevant details. Did you have mango as a one off this morning? In terms of memory storage episodic memory is more reliant on part of your brain called the hippocampus (a small region in the middle of your brain), whereas semantic memory often resides in a more distributed manner throughout the brain. This is not a 100% clear distinction between these though, and there is some ongoing debate by scientists as to which memory systems rely more on which areas.

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