RichardR
5th March 2003, 08:23 PM
I got my April 2003 issue of Discover magazine yesterday (and it’s only March 5th!). It has an interesting article entitled Memory’s Machine, on how neurobiologist Karel Svoboda has been watching live neurons interact in rats' brains.
Svoboda has put small “windows” in the skulls of live rats, over the area of their brains that process information from their whiskers. He observed spine-like objects growing from the neurons, establishing new synapses. Some of these withered after less than a day, but others lasted for months. Svoboda hypothesizes that these relate to memory and a learning process: where a connection is useful the connection stays; where it is not, it retracts. These connections were recorded by a camera, and some of these were reproduced in the magazine .
These findings support the work of another neurobiologist Wen-Biao Gan, who has monitored similar spines in the visual cortexes of mice, and found that 96% of these remain after one month. The conclusion is that the brain’s synaptic connections appear stable enough to store long term memories.
Of course, there’s a lot more to learn before we know how memory works, but it’s progress. And there is nothing so far that suggests memory is anything other than a brain function.
Someone on a thread over in Paranormal asked something like “please show me a picture of where memories are stored in the brain”. Well, “Discover” should be on the news stands now.
Svoboda has put small “windows” in the skulls of live rats, over the area of their brains that process information from their whiskers. He observed spine-like objects growing from the neurons, establishing new synapses. Some of these withered after less than a day, but others lasted for months. Svoboda hypothesizes that these relate to memory and a learning process: where a connection is useful the connection stays; where it is not, it retracts. These connections were recorded by a camera, and some of these were reproduced in the magazine .
These findings support the work of another neurobiologist Wen-Biao Gan, who has monitored similar spines in the visual cortexes of mice, and found that 96% of these remain after one month. The conclusion is that the brain’s synaptic connections appear stable enough to store long term memories.
Of course, there’s a lot more to learn before we know how memory works, but it’s progress. And there is nothing so far that suggests memory is anything other than a brain function.
Someone on a thread over in Paranormal asked something like “please show me a picture of where memories are stored in the brain”. Well, “Discover” should be on the news stands now.