Eventually, it exists independently in the cortex, where it is put away for long-term storage. Over time, and through consistent recall, the memory becomes encoded in both the hippocampus and the cortex. The more often a memory is recalled, the stronger its neural network becomes. This creates a network of cells that, together, encode a memory. Through a process known as synaptic plasticity, neurons constantly produce new proteins to remodel parts of the synapse, such as the receptors for these chemicals, which enables the neurons to selectively strengthen their connections with one another. Each neuron can be connected to thousands of others in this way. Neurons communicate with each other through synapses - junctions between these cells that include a tiny gap across which chemical messengers can be sent. Researchers are still pinpointing the details, but they know that autobiographical memories - those of events experienced personally - begin to take lasting form in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, in the hours and days that follow the event. “To have proper memory function, you have to have forgetting.” Biology of forgettingĭifferent types of memory are created and stored in varying ways, and in various areas of the brain. “What is memory without forgetting?” asks Oliver Hardt, a cognitive psychologist studying the neurobiology of memory at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. And a better understanding of that state could lead to breakthroughs in treatments for conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and even Alzheimer’s disease. In some - perhaps even all - animals, the brain’s standard state is not to remember, but to forget. Rather, forgetting seems to be an active mechanism that is constantly at work in the brain. They began to put forward the radical idea that the brain is built to forget.Ī growing body of work, cultivated in the past decade, suggests that the loss of memories is not a passive process. But then a handful of researchers who were investigating memory began to bump up against findings that seemed to contradict that decades-old assumption. Until about ten years ago, most researchers thought that forgetting was a passive process in which memories, unused, decay over time like a photograph left in the sunlight.

Bad memory pictures