How are memories saved in the brain?
In: Biology
Long-term memories are stored in the configuration of neurons in your brain.
People tend to think of memories as something like a word document: that you decide to remember, find the right folder, open the document, and read the text exactly as it was the day it was saved.
In reality, no memory is truly preserved like that. What we call memories are actually closer to a live-action retelling of an event. Your neurons activate a series of sensory feelings (touch, sight, emotions, etc) that simulate what you were feeling at the moment the memory was made. This has some…tricky implications
1. Unreliable narrator: your neural network is constantly adjusting itself. Neuron connections are strengthened/weakened/emphasized/removed constantly. So even if your brain “perfectly” captured an event into a memory, over time the neurons that are a part of that memory “circuit” will change in some way. This results is features of the memory being distorted. The degree to which this distortion occurs is based on how significant the changes to the neural pathways are.
2. Lazy narrator: As if #1 wasn’t already bad enough, recent research is starting to show that when people try to remember something, they aren’t accessing the original memory: they may be accessing the most recent recall of the memory. To put this into other terms…imagine if you wrote 100 letters in a word document and saved it. Your computer is a little wonky, and you know that when you open that file again, 10% of the words will be wrong somehow. BUT the next time you open that file, you’re not opening the original document…you’re opening the 10%-wrong file, so the document becomes even MORE incorrect. Each successive time you open it, more and more words are messed up.
The above also excludes the idea that you don’t necessarily remember the objectively important details, but rather what was emotionally important to you. So there’s already bias even before you consider the wiggley-wobbly accuracy of biological memory. It’s unsurprising that eye-witness testimony is considered one of the weakest forms of evidence haha.
I’m not as familiar with the differences in short-term memory so I won’t make any comments on those.
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