A new study now in reveals that the memory for a specific experience is stored in multiple parallel "copies." These are preserved for varying durations, modified to certain degrees, and sometimes deleted over time, report researchers at the University of Basel. The ability to turn experiences into memories allows us to learn from the past and use what we learned as a model to respond appropriately to new situations.
For this reason, as the world around us changes, this memory model cannot simply be a fixed archive of the good old days. Rather, it must be dynamic, changing over and adapting to new circumstances to better help us predict the future and select the best course of action. How the could regulate a memory's dynamics was a mystery—until multiple memory copies were discovered.
Professor Flavio Donato's research group at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, uses mouse models to investigate how memories are stored in the brain and how they change throughout life. His team has now revealed that in the hippocampus, a brain region responsible for learning from experience, a single event is stored in parallel memory copies among at least three different groups of neurons, which emerge at different stages during . Memory copies come and go, and change with time First to arrive during development, the early-born neurons are responsible for the long-term persistence of a memory.
In fact, even though their memory copy is initially too weak for the brain to access, it becomes .