Researchers for the first time see the evidence of the brain where memory record of time and place. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week showed that the similarity of the pattern of brain activation as an indicator of memory to remember the vastness of space and time between the actual events.
The researchers who conducted the study at Ohio State University asked the participants that consisted of nine women aged 19 to 26 years old, wearing a smart phone based on Android with a neck strap for a month.
The phone comes with an application that will take photos at random in a day, recording the time, place, whether the person wearing moves and other information. Within a month, the phone was on average took about 5,400 photos of each participant. Once a month, participants are placed in the fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity while they were shown 120 photos of them.
The participants were asked to try to remember the events depicted in each picture and relive the experience in their mind while looking at the photograph for eight seconds. The researchers compared the data fMRI couple pictures of it on each participant. Couples selected photos taken at least 100 meters apart and 16 hours.
Recalling the experience "live" many parts of the brain, but different memory creates distinct patterns of activity. The more different the second memory, the pattern will be increasingly different activities.
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| Researchers found the left anterior hippocampus gives a 'broad picture' of the time and place of memories. (Picture from: http://bit.ly/1HV74QM) |
The researchers found that the hippocampus part of the brain to store information about where and when they occur specific memories. The farther apart memories in terms of place and time, the farther apart anyway memories picture was seen in the hippocampus.
"What we take here is not the entire memory, but the core principle - where and when experienced," said Per Sederberg, lead author of the study results from the Ohio State University.
"This could be seen as a memory center, where we have a large-scale representation of our experiences."
Similar research has been conducted in mice, even finding rat neurons which is the password for the room got last year's Nobel Prize for Medicine.
There was also no studies in humans that asks them to remember a list of words or any other new information they see but it's only a few minutes of recording memory is created under experimental conditions. Recent studies expand the dimensions to see in real life human memory.
"We found the hippocampus describe memories of time and space for at least one month in a span distance of 30 kilometers," he said.
"This is the first time we can study the memory scale in our lives," he said.
The results showed that the patterns of activity in the front left hippocampus more different to memories of events that happened so far apart in terms of time and space.
"If the participant does not remember the pictures, we do not see this relationship," said Sederberg.
"We also did not find this effect if we only ask about the time and not a place of memory. We found that the time and the place is very relevant in our memory representations."
Sederberg said that the picture they found on the front of the left hippocampus is not the whole memory, but only the image width where and when it occurred.
"What we found may only targets a mechanism that gives us the general gist memory. And then there are processes running in other parts of the hippocampus and cortex spreads through when we fully relive the memories," he said.
Sederberg also noted that the hippocampus is one of the first areas of the brain function decline in patients with Alzheimer's disease.
"People with Alzheimer's may forget the experiences and people because they can not effectively target their old memories. They can not get the memory back because they can not get proper public gesture towards the memory of it," he said.
Sederberg hope can then be repeated the study in people with different ages and people who show early symptoms of dementia to see how their brains describe their memory.
He also plans to collect data monthly or yearly to see how we target the memories with different intervals and further afield.
"There is still a decade of work ahead. This is just the first step," he said as quoted by the official website of Ohio State University in the United States. *** [EKA | FROM VARIOUS SOURCES | MNT]
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