![]() The good news is, you no longer have to feel bad for forgetting the name of your old neighbor or the aunt you only met at one family reunion when you were seven. “We want to know what the memory is made of only then will we know how information is coded in the brain. “Memory is this sort of catchall term for things that go into the process which includes experience, perception, learning, memory formation, memory consolidation, memory maintenance, and recall,” Ryan said. Similarly, we can probe at memories by looking at outward behaviors, but that’s akin to seeing an inherited trait instead of the genes themselves. Ryan likens the current state of memory neuroscience to the field of genetics in the early 20th century, when we had ideas about inheritance but were a long way from understanding how genes work to create that inheritance. These revelations about memory are likely only the beginnings of the whole truth. We think that is also reversible, in principle.” That’s why I think infantile amnesia happens. “We go from being dependent on caregivers to being more autonomous. “That’s a remarkable feature of a subset of the mammalian kingdom, probably because we need to exist in two different niche environments,” Ryan said. The nature of our existence changes so much between infancy and adolescence that most, if not all, of those memories are suppressed. This kind of natural forgetting might also explain why most of us don’t remember anything from early childhood. Those relationships don’t tend to change across a lifetime. Motor memories are related to a person’s body relative to physical pressures like gravity, and laws of motion. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “it’s like riding a bicycle,” this is where it comes from. Those memories with strong psychological associations tend to stick, and motor memories tend to remain even across decades. The work also shows that some memories are more likely to be forgotten than others. That’s why people can still retrieve them using interventions,” Ryan said. We’re activating natural forgetting at a time when we shouldn’t be doing it. “When we’re forgetting memories due to disease, we’re not actually forgetting them. These same processes might also provide insight into what’s happening in diseases like Alzheimer’s. Which is why you can forget things temporarily and then have the memory triggered. Importantly, those memories aren’t actually gone, they’re just more difficult to recall. The environment told your brain that information was no longer necessary. It’s part of the reason you may not remember the name of a schoolmate or coworker you haven’t seen in a while. Instead, the brain forgets things based on changes in the environment. In this way, forgetting can be a kind of learning. You need to be flexible,” Ryan told SYFY WIRE.įorgetting things allows our minds to be flexible in a changing environment, open to new experiences which might differ from the ones we previously encountered. You need to be able to not overfit to particular experiences. Otherwise, you get stuck, and you generalize too much. “We need to be able to forget information that’s not relevant. Moreover, the data suggests those processes, when they’re occurring normally, are a good thing. These experimental processes could mimic those which occur naturally in the brain and result in our having forgotten something we previously knew. ![]() The memories are still there, but the nature of the engram has changed such that it can no longer be accessed. Those findings show that forgetting may not be the result of literal memory loss. They’ve done this by labeling engrams - cells which store memories - with optogenetic controls, allowing them to turn specific memories on and off. Over the last 10 years or so, scientists have began unraveling the mysteries around memory formation and recall by studying mice and rats. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Tomás Ryan is a neuroscientist at the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin who, along with colleague Paul Frankland, completed a review of existing literature to craft a new view of memory and memory loss. It turns out, that loss of memory might be a corruption of a totally natural and even helpful process of beneficial forgetting. That’s why diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia, which rob us of our cherished memories are so tragic. Forgetting something, from a certain point of view, is almost the same as if that thing had never happened at all. Each of us builds a model of the world around us through our own experiences and our memories of those experiences.
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