eli5 How does the brain store information?

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Like what is the unit or language? What is the mechanism of reading, writing or recalling a piece of information.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

> Like what is the unit or language?

Not sure what you’re expecting with “language.”

In the most general terms, information is stored in nervous systems through various changes to neurons (and maybe also to glial cells). Those changes can include changes in either intrinsic properties (firing patterns, excitability, cellular structure, etc.) or synaptic connections (strength, reliability, wiring diagram, etc.).

Both “writing to” (aka learning) and “readout” (aka recall) require specific neuronal activity.

There are many mechanisms that are studied.

One well studied example is Hebbian learning, often cutely summarized by “Neurons that fire together wire together.” “Fire” here means have a sudden, large, well-studied change in the neuron’s electrical “pressure” (voltage). This means that if a neuron A participates in getting another neuron B to fire, that connection between A and B is strengthened–meaning it will be even more likely to successfully participate in getting B to fire in the future.

Do that many times–through practice–and you can begin to really “tune” a set of connections. That is one kind of storage of information. If you’ve ever learned a physical pattern, like a musical scale on an instrument, you’ve probably marched some neurons through their Hebbian paces.

That said, we know a great deal about such changes and yet there is a tip of the iceberg effect. What we can’t say in 2023 is exactly how a person’s brain changes to learn a new foreign language word, for example. That’s a tall order.

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