Like what is the unit or language? What is the mechanism of reading, writing or recalling a piece of information.
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Brains store information as patterns of connections between neurons. It’s kind of like an address to get somewhere, but it’s not the address itself that matters, it’s the route you take. If something matches, if there are a lot of nerves firing, the connected nerves downstream are more likely to fire, too. If it doesn’t match, they are less likely to fire.
For example, you’re looking at something. Your retina is activated in a certain pattern, and that pattern goes through your optic nerves to your brain. That activates a specific pattern of nerves in your cortex, which are all connected in very complicated ways. More nerves in your retina fire at two specific places in your field of vision which means the neurons connected to those are more likely to fire. That triggers neurons down a cascading pathway that matches the same pathway that always triggers when you’re looking at a face. Those two points are *eyes*.
You know they’re called “eyes” because when you were a child, that pattern of nerves in your retina were firing at the same time that nerves in your ears were firing in a pattern associated with air vibrations from someone saying the word “eyes.” That happened a lot, so that connection was reinforced. Whenever the retina fires like that, the pathway gets triggered that leads to the same pathway triggered by the sound “eyes” – which also triggers the pathway normally triggered by seeing the letters E Y E S.
Since you’re looking at a face, the path also leads to the area of your brain dedicated to recognizing individuals. They’re brown eyes – that means neurons for brown eyes continue to fire, but neurons for blue eyes don’t. A particular nose shape makes the path fire in *this* direction and the mouth goes in this other direction. Each connected neuron may or may not fire, until the only neurons that *do* fire are the ones associated with the face for Geoff. You’re looking at Geoff.
Because you’re looking at Geoff, that encourages certain neurons to fire that lead to episodic memory. Events that involved Geoff are more likely to fire, and some of them do, including maybe learning his name, or the last time you saw him.
Maybe the firing of neurons peters out there, and you’re done remembering about Geoff. Thinking, “I want to remember more about Geoff” sort of boosts the signal going into the episodic memory. The pathway of neurons continues to fire as connections continue to be made.
This is all very reflexive and recursive. Maybe the “face” pattern isn’t strong enough to continue firing down that path but it still tries to go down other paths, some of which lead back to the “face” path but with a stronger signal this time. “Eyes” leads to “nose” which leads back to “eyes” and they both lead to “mouth” which reinforces the signal to “face” which leads *back* to eyes and mouth and nose. The pattern is also very strong for “metal” and “glass” and “lights” so eventually the “face” signal diminishes until its gone, but that other signal is still very strong. Oh hey, it’s not a face it’s the front of a car which often sort of looks like a face…
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