How exactly does the brain store information?
In: Biology
The short answer: it’s complicated
The slightly longer answer: it’s somewhere in the network of connections between neurons. As you learn and experience new things, dendrites grow and form new synapses. The longer you spend studying, the stronger the connections are and the longer it takes to forget/disconnect. However it’s complicated and truthfully we still don’t understand how it works.
Source: am neuroscientist who used to study memory, cognition, and learning. (I started in a new lab less than a year ago so it’s still pretty fresh.)
My understanding is that you have cells(neurons) that process sensory information. When you see a red ball you have a neuron that knows red, you have another that knows sphere. There are others that process shiny, soft, rubber, smell, sound when it bounces, etc. When you see a red ball a path is created between all the sensory information creating the full experience of the ball. The memory, or the storing of the experience is another cell that remembers the path those neurons formed during that experience. So when you remember something you aren’t technically remembering the actual event you are piecing together the experience over again.
At least that was the latest theory I’ve read.
Commenting to check answer later. I assume a neuron stores it but how the brain creates a picture during sleep or when we recall a memory is quite puzzling to me. It would be interesting to know what is the biological equivalent of the screen where the information is being played.
Information and stimuli comes into your brain trough your senses: smell, sounds, vision, etc. Most of this if filtered before you even realise it. The relevant stimuli then comes into the working memory, which contains information you are using right now (like when you are calculating, the numbers are in your working memory) and is fairly limited. You can only hold 4-7 ‘chuncks’ of information in there. When the information is repeated or you pay more attention to it, it will go to the short term memory. For example, you repeated a phone number a few times, so you can put it in your phone. Most of this information is discarted, but some will go to the long term memory. This is mostly information you pay attention to and repeat often, which is important to you or which you relate to stuff you already know. That is why, for example, you remember a name of a person better if you relate it to a fact you are familiar with.
How we store it, we don’t know. Some say pictures, some say words, some say something abstract, certain nerve patterns, to name a few.
The brain is really fascinating. A chemical computer activated by electrical impulses.
It’s also interesting how different areas of the brain processes and stores different types of information.
And the way we have different levels of brain function like conscious and subconscious makes it even more mysterious.
Hopefully someday we will discover more about how it works.
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