The process of memories being stored and retrieved

The John’s Green’s quotation from “Paper Towns” stated “The town was paper, but the memories were not.”― John Green, Paper Towns. But how are memories being definitely stored and retrieved? The today’s post is aimed at explaining the biological process of creating memories.

Memory is stored in the brain in two ways. According to McGill University and the Canadian Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health, and Addiction, short-term memories such as a hypothetical chess move or a hotel room number are processed in the pre-frontal lobe, a highly developed region at the front of the brain.

In the hippocampus, a deeper brain part, short-term memory is converted to long-term memory. The hippocampus combines contemporaneous experiences from diverse sensory regions of the brain into a single “episode” of memory. For example, instead of having numerous independent memories of how the party looked, sounded, and smelled, you may have only one recollection of a dinner party. As memories are played through the hippocampus, the connections between neurons linked with a memory ultimately become a fixed combination, so that if you hear a piece of music, you’re likely to be inundated with other memories associated with a specific episode where you heard that same music.

When someone recalls a memory episode, scientists can see these diverse areas of the brain light up on a brain scan, revealing how memories are an index of these different stored experiences and ideas. According to studies from McGill and New York University, the hippocampus helps to establish the pattern of connections that constitute a memory, but the memory itself is dependent on the stability of the connections between individual brain cells.

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