Let’s brag about how advanced we are in science; some things still remain secret. One of the best examples to be given to this is the secrets of the brain, which is a part of our body, closest to us. As you know, the scientific evolution that humanity has been following for millions of years gets blocked at some point when it comes to the brain and its functioning.
How and where the brain encodes temporary memories is one of the most curious questions of scientists for years. But according to a new study, scientists seem to have finally deciphered the “secret code” the brain uses to create this type of memory.
The brain perceives the most relevant emotional information in the environment and transforms it into a simpler dock
This type of memory that allows people to temporarily hold and change information for short periods of time. Also known as working memory. For example, working memory comes into play when we briefly remember the order of numbers by dialing a number while calling a place, or when we ask someone for the address of a restaurant and remember which way to go there while going to the described destination. The new research in question represents a very fundamental step for working memory research.
One of the theories of working memory is that it relies on special “stores” in the brain, unlike sensory information from the eye or nose, or long-term memories such as basic information we learn in school. Derek Nee, assistant professor in the field, states that there are no such “private warehouses” in another theory. In this alternative theory, Nee notes, working memory is essentially a phenomenon that occurs “when sensory and motor representations are around us as we relate the past to the future.” But a new paper in Neuron challenges both theories.
Accordingly, working memory seems to work one step ahead of sensory information gathering, rather than mirroring what happens during perception or relying on special memory stores. In other words, working memory extracts only the most relevant sensory information from the environment and collects that information in a relatively simple code.
The brain stores only relevant information needed for the task
“There are clues that what we’re storing [in working memory] for decades may differ from what we perceive,” says New York City To solve the mysteries of this memory, author Clayton Curtis, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, and Yuna Kwak, a doctoral student at the same university, used a brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow in different parts of the brain.
Using this technique to scan the brains of nine volunteers who were performing a task that engaged their working memory, the team in one experiment showed participants a circle of grids or slashes on a screen for about four seconds. Then this graph disappeared and after 12 seconds the participants were asked to remember the angle of the slashes. In other trials, participants were shown a moving point cloud sliding in the same direction and asked to remember the exact angle of the point cloud’s movement. By asking participants to pay attention only to the direction of the slashes or the angle of movement of the point cloud, the researchers thought that their brain activity would only reflect certain features of the graphs. After examining the brain scans, the team found that the results were exactly as they had predicted.
Using computer modeling to visualize complex brain activity, the researchers thus created a kind of map that represents the peaks and valleys of activity in different groups of brain cells. Adding ‘receptor areas’, which can be defined as the activation of brain cells that process visual data in response to stimuli visible in a particular region of the person’s visual field, to their model, the team determined how the participants’ brain activity correlated with what they observed on the screen during the memory task. According to this analysis, the brain only stores the relevant information needed for the task at hand, rather than coding all the finer details of each graph.
Working memory acts as a bridge between perception and action
By examining topographic maps, researchers found that the brain activity used to encode this information looks like a simple, straight line. observed to appear. The angle of the line also matched the orientation of the grids or the angle of motion of the point cloud, depending on which graph was shown to the participants. On the other hand, these line-like patterns of brain activity occurred in the visual cortex, where the brain receives and processes visual information, and in the parietal cortex, an important area for memory processing and storage.
However, the main point, according to the researchers, was not the brain’s use of lines to represent images. Pointing out that the most important thing about the subject is the fact that “representation is abstracted from grids [or] to something other than movement”, Nee also states that the team’s use of very simple graphics that do not fully reflect the visual complexity of the real world is also a limiting factor in the study.
However, Nee notes that this does not change the fact that the study gives “a new idea of what it means to keep something ‘online’ in mind for the future.” Working memory essentially acts as a bridge between perception and action. “This work offers an unprecedented look at this mysterious intermediate region between perception and action, in identifying a representational format that is neither similar to what is perceived nor to what is to be done, but clearly readable from visual signals,” said Nee. uses expressions.
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