How are long-term memories formed?
How are long-term memories formed?
There are many theories on how long-term memories are created. While many books give the impression that science moves forward slowly, in real life, many theories are formed and then proven wrong.
Finding how the brain stores the memories of our lives has been no different. It has been frustrating, it has taken many turns. New imaging techniques we talked about earlier have helped advance our understanding more and more.
Some of the first theories, we have already spoken about. Pavlov’s dog and concept of classical conditioning was one of the earliest looks into how our brain stores memories. While this initially led to unsuccessful searches for connection in the brain, it eventually led to theories about how the brain learns through changes in synapses.
What does this mean?
Imagine that you are learning something.
One of your brain cells (a neuron) sends a signal to a second neuron.
Every time you revise the thing you are learning, this same signal is sent between these two neurons. The more this happens, the easier the signal is passed. Like someone walking across the forest slowly creates a well-trodden path. Each time you walk the same way, makes the path more and more obvious. It also makes walking that way easier and easier. This process is very similar.
This theory has developed more and more.
More recently the phenomenon called long-term potentiation was proposed… But we’ll call it LTP for short.
LTP built on the path analogy we spoke about earlier.
If the path is well used, it becomes easier to use (if the connections are active, they become stronger).
If more than one person walk side by side along the path, it becomes wider (if two cells send signals at the same time, the path becomes stronger).
f the path isn’t used, it slowly disappears. This is the reverse and is called long-term depression or LTD.
Conclusion
There are many theories on our long-term memories are formed. More recently researchers have proposed the concept of long-term potentiation. This is built on the premise that when we when we learn things we create a link between brain cells. The more we use this link, the stronger it becomes creating a long-term memory.