Is it a series of chemicals one creates overtime and stores in the brain? What exactly is being stored in your brain once you make a memory?
In: Biology
Memories are stored as links between neurons in your brain. Neurons are brain cells that send signals to other neurons. The number of neurons in your brain mostly stays the same over your life. But, the links between them is what changes when we learn or remember things.
The exact nature of how a memory gets encoded into links between neurons isn’t well understood though.
Physically, a memory is a specific pattern of neurons firing in the brain. Recalling that memory means making those neurons fire in the same pattern again, essentially reconstructing the memory.
No it’s not the chemicals themselves but the neuron network which is the links formed between different brain nerve cells which are connected to all the surrounding neurons by synapses. The neuron network is electrochemical in nature. It’s not only the precise chemicals but the exact flow of electrons between them.
It’s not an easy concept to grasp but if you think of how data is stored in a book or on a hard drive – nope it’s the exact opposite of that. It’s not orderly. Think about a network of telephone poles. If you have 10 poles (neurons) in a circle around each other – you take each pole and run telephone cables (synapses) from that pole to every other pole. So you have 9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1 = 45 connections. Add another pole and form another 10 connections and keep going up to a million poles. Now you’ll have n (n+1)÷2 = 500,000,500,000.
500 Trillion connections!
A memory will be stored in a group of connections built up from individual synaptic connections. Now comes what will blow your mind – These aren’t permanent. When you recall a memory you are overwriting the connections that are there. Those childhood memories of yours aren’t childhood memories – they’re memories of you remembering memories of you remembering memories of you remembering memories of what your brain reprocessed during your sleep from your short term memories on the day.
Don’t believe me – check this out:
[Professor Bruce Hood – Change Blindness](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOF-saZ1XSQ)
This is explanation very, very ELI5 and there’s a lot more to this.
FYI the answer is nobody knows . Some interesting ideas being kicked around here but we don’t really know
Nobody knows yes because in experiments where doctors cut different pieces from the brain the patient don’t lose his memories. And hence the theory of the fractal brain.
In a previous ELI5, I explained that memory isn’t a filing cabinet, it’s a web.
This web is made of neurons, which communicate electrochemically. Place two of your fingers, facing each other, almost touching but not. These are the neurons in our example. Picture electricity running up the left finger to the nail. When it gets to the nail, it releases chemicals (neurotransmitters) which are received by the right finger, triggering it to pass along the electrical signal and so on
Physically, neurons can be something like 4 to 100 micrometers long (a micron is the same as a micrometer, no idea why there’s two terms for it)
Imagine our brain is a field of tall grass. And you want to get from point A to point B (say, you wanna memorize a piece of poetry). Everytime you recite the poem, you’re crossing the field from point A to point B. It’d be hard at first, since the grass is tall and you have to force your way through it.
But the more you read the poem, the more you cross that hypothetical grass field, the more those tall grass gave way. slowly forming a path than you can easily navigate. Eventually the grass will wither away and forms a straight dirt path than you can quickly walk through.
So in the most basic sense, your brains (the grass field) adapt to what you’re doing, forming new connections (our dirt parth) of neurons, making subsequent action much quicker everytime you repeat it. Though there’s bunch of different types of memory, a short-term memory, a long-term memory. Think of it as a RAM and a HDD respectively on your brain. Long term memory is also further differentiated between its use etc.
Edit: words
[https://youtu.be/CUT6nET1yjo](https://youtu.be/CUT6nET1yjo) Matpat explains it pretty well.
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