Imagine sitting with your friends chatting about previous trips. You might mention the time when you went to a beautiful waterfall. You mention some details of the event, like the sun, weather and scenery. You can remember the activities from that day. But would you remember the exact duration you were at the waterfall, apart from a crude
number? Or what you did the day earlier or the day later. Probably not
so clearly. The event became fresh in your memory, but many details were lost to time. How does the brain retain this experience.
Jai and colleagues investigated the phenomena of coding experiences in the brain to understand how the mind recollects past experiences. They used an interesting model where a rat's behavior is monitored while it searches for a reward and then consumes it. The rat's activity gets divided into mobility (searching for reward) and immobility (consumption of reward). The rat's brain uses the changes in activity as switches to break time into discrete chunks. Each chunk becomes an episode and might be processed and saved differently. This way the brain could define interesting parts of experience and save them as separate memories, such as memories of experience on paths to reach rewards versus memories of being at those reward locations. To know more on how this happens, please listen to Jai.
To know more, please refer to:
Distinct hippocampal-cortical memory representations for experiences associated with movement versus immobility
eLife, Aug., 2017
Jai and colleagues investigated the phenomena of coding experiences in the brain to understand how the mind recollects past experiences. They used an interesting model where a rat's behavior is monitored while it searches for a reward and then consumes it. The rat's activity gets divided into mobility (searching for reward) and immobility (consumption of reward). The rat's brain uses the changes in activity as switches to break time into discrete chunks. Each chunk becomes an episode and might be processed and saved differently. This way the brain could define interesting parts of experience and save them as separate memories, such as memories of experience on paths to reach rewards versus memories of being at those reward locations. To know more on how this happens, please listen to Jai.
To know more, please refer to:
Distinct hippocampal-cortical memory representations for experiences associated with movement versus immobility
eLife, Aug., 2017
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