It’s a phenomenon known as ‘infantile amnesia’. Adults rarely remember events from before the age of three, and have patchy memories when it comes to things that happened to them between the ages of three and seven. Interestingly, one exception to HM’s inability to remember autobiographical events was his memory of a birthday plane ride around Hartford, perhaps because it had great emotional significance.įrom birth to adolescence Infancy and childhoodĬan you remember your first birthday? Your second? If not, don’t panic-you’re not alone. And the hippocampus, it seems, is particularly important for memory, especially of specific autobiographical events (episodic memory). But the case of HM showed that different areas of the brain are responsible for different kinds of memory. However, he could still learn new motor skills and was able to repeat these later on, even though he couldn’t remember learning them.īefore HM, it was commonly thought that when you remembered something, all the neurons in your brain worked together to evoke a memory. For the rest of his life, HM was unable to form any long-term memories and couldn’t remember specific autobiographical events from his life. The procedure reduced his seizures, but drastically affected his memory. In the 1950s, as a treatment for incapacitating epilepsy, HM had a drastic operation in which his hippocampus, and some of the surrounding area, was removed. The fascinating case of Henry Molaison, known as ‘HM’, gave scientists a number of insights into the nature of memory and how it’s stored in the brain. Memories are formed by neurons (pictured) that fire in our brains, creating or changing networks of connections. For example, an area of the brain called the hippocampus is important for storing memories of particular things that happened in your life, known as episodic memories. Rather, different (interconnected) parts of the brain specialise in different kinds of memories.
Memories are stored in different, interconnected parts of the brain Memories aren’t just stored in just one place in the brain. Able to thrash your partner at Pacman without even thinking, even though you haven’t played for years? You can thank your procedural memory, which is all about learned motor skills. Good at remembering facts and figures? That’s what’s known as your semantic memory. It can be explicit (consciously remembered) or implicit (unconscious). There are a number of different kinds of memory. It’s this persistent change in the strength and pattern of connections that is a ‘memory’. This invites surrounding neurons to start firing, creating a network of connections of various strengths. As a person processes an event, neurons in the brain pass information through synapses (tiny gaps between neurons). Neurons are nerve cells which send electrochemical signals to each other. In fact, every time we remember something, we alter that memory a little bit. What we remember and how we remember it depends on when we do the remembering, and what meaning and experience we bring to that memory. They can become distorted, and they can be manipulated. They can become stronger or weaker over time. Rather, memories are dynamic-they’re always changing. That’s because memories aren’t just static recordings which are ‘there’ to be accessed. We imagine it faithfully recording events in detail which we can, at some later stage, retrieve by simply pressing the ‘play’ button.īut this video-camera idea of memory isn’t really accurate. Many of us think of our memory as being a bit like a recording device-a video camera, say.
0 kommentar(er)
