Brain Question

[surftheiop]

Chemically/physically what is thinking/memories?
Like how does the brain hold memories? Is it chemical balances or what? I was wondering to myself if there is a physical limit on how many memories a person could have in their brain and it made me wonder what the memory mechanism is

[Taraz]

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Chemically/physically what is thinking/memories? Like how does the brain hold memories?

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We don't really know. It's a really, really complex issue.

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Is it chemical balances or what?

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I'm not sure what that means, but a memory is basically a specific pattern of neurons firing in your brain. Often, it is your brain recreating the conditions that were present at the time the memory was formed. So parts of your visual system actually fire when you try to remember an image.

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I was wondering to myself if there is a physical limit on how many memories a person could have in their brain and it made me wonder what the memory mechanism is

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This is a tough question. There probably is on some level, but this is another unanswered question.

[madnak]

It's weird as [censored]. There doesn't appear to be any single location in the brain for memories, and damage to different regions can affect memory in different ways. Memory storage is also a mystery, but it's clear some kind of "optimization" happens.

[chasing.idyll]

There's no known limit to human memory. As far as we know, everything is stored in long-term memory, and the trouble on our end is recalling it.

Memory is stored in synapses. When you experience things, sensory input is transferred to the brain, where networks of neurons fire and neurotransmitters are swapped between neurons during synapses. Information is passed this way throughout the brain and is responsible for the "mental images" we "see" in our consciousness (along with smell, taste, touch, etc. - which are arguably all contained in these "mental images"). We have impressions of these experiences left over in our minds, which can be triggered by related events in the future.

The memories themselves occur when related events trigger the networks to fire in the same way. The actual memory is "stored" in the synapse; it's technically not "stored," though, it seems. (This is info from basic Psych courses at school, I'm probably confused.)

Edit: Taraz beat me to it. He's the pro, too, so listen to him.

[GaSSPaNiCC]

Another fundamental question of neuroscience is consciousness, how is it neurons firing in the brain can ever give rise to a conscious experience?

[mbillie1]

eat some mushrooms and you will figure it out

[vhawk01]

Thomas Edison told me that we have a bunch of little men in our brains who work in shifts. Two hour shifts, to be exact. So, whenever you experience something, one of these little men remembers it. Trying to recall something you've learned is simply a matter of getting in touch with whatever little man was on duty when you first experienced it. If you are lucky he is still in the break room.

[tame_deuces]

Psychology usually refers to the brain's memory capacity as 'unlimited for all known purposes'.

Memory is subjective though, it is subject to change, situation dependant and it may be hard to recall. Usually it is referred to as a 'subjective representation of past events' and not actual representation. There is much research showing how memories change over time.

It is also common to separate the term memory into 'encoding', 'memory' and 'recall'. This gives a better view of how it works.

Encoding is putting things to memory, memory is the actual storage and recall is the process of getting it back from storage.

[Mr_Moore]

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Thomas Edison told me that we have a bunch of little men in our brains who work in shifts. Two hour shifts, to be exact. So, whenever you experience something, one of these little men remembers it. Trying to recall something you've learned is simply a matter of getting in touch with whatever little man was on duty when you first experienced it. If you are lucky he is still in the break room.

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How do these little men remember? do they have little men inside their head as well?

[soko]

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Thomas Edison told me that we have a bunch of little men in our brains who work in shifts. Two hour shifts, to be exact. So, whenever you experience something, one of these little men remembers it. Trying to recall something you've learned is simply a matter of getting in touch with whatever little man was on duty when you first experienced it. If you are lucky he is still in the break room.

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How do these little men remember? do they have little men inside their head as well?

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I think they have video cameras

[FortunaMaximus]

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It's weird as [censored]. There doesn't appear to be any single location in the brain for memories, and damage to different regions can affect memory in different ways. Memory storage is also a mystery, but it's clear some kind of "optimization" happens.

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Redundancy. I thought memories were stored holographically within the brain in different areas? Is this still speculation? This might be a defense against damage to one area, as you can draw a memory from multiple loci within the brain.

With an estimated 100 billion neurons, it's clear you have a lot of room for redundancy and potentially a huge number of combinations. And storing a single memory wouldn't take many of those combinations, even with several layers of redundancy.

Capacity? It shouldn't be infinite but it's pretty damn massive. Since you can reuse a neuron or set of neurons to store different memories with the same reference bases (specific colors, scents, etc.)

It's going to take technology/science a long time to decipher this, but it's amazing that nature evolved such a wonderful neural net on its own.

[Splendour]

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It's weird as [censored]. There doesn't appear to be any single location in the brain for memories, and damage to different regions can affect memory in different ways. Memory storage is also a mystery, but it's clear some kind of "optimization" happens.

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Redundancy. I thought memories were stored holographically within the brain in different areas? Is this still speculation? This might be a defense against damage to one area, as you can draw a memory from multiple loci within the brain.

With an estimated 100 billion neurons, it's clear you have a lot of room for redundancy and potentially a huge number of combinations. And storing a single memory wouldn't take many of those combinations, even with several layers of redundancy.

Capacity? It shouldn't be infinite but it's pretty damn massive. Since you can reuse a neuron or set of neurons to store different memories with the same reference bases (specific colors, scents, etc.)

It's going to take technology/science a long time to decipher this, but it's amazing that nature evolved such a wonderful neural net on its own.

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The author of the book I am currently reading (Dr Melvin Morse in <u>Where God Lives</u> ) poses a provocative question on this topic.

Here's an excerpt with his question and conjectures:

"Can memory exist outside the body? This would seem to be a shocking question, yet no modern scientific or medical theory currently explains memory and where (or how) it is stored.
I was speaking at UCLA to a group of neuroscientists when the subject of the location of memory first presented itself as a valid question. A physician in the audience pointed out that if comatose patients can have NDEs and remember them, then we need to explain how a dying, dysfunctional brain can process a long-term memory. I knew from my transformation study that children not only remember their NDEs, they remember them all of their lives.
One simple answer is that perhaps memories are not stored in the brain. Although an outrageous statement, if true it would answer many questions associated with perception, including ghosts, angels, the origin of past lives, even false memory syndrome, in which people "remember" childhood events that never happened to them."

After that his next question is if reincarnation is the "tapping in" to a universal memory bank?

A very unusual conjecture. I would have never thought that memory could be outside the body and, of course, none of this is proven so its a pretty radical idea.