Follow our blogs feed 
Hello guest, welcome to PJ online
gateway to the world of pharmacy and medicines
What are memories made of?
By Andrew Onariase
22 Apr 2010
Can you remember the first memory you ever had? Whatever it may be?
Psychologists define memory as “an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information”. We access our stores of knowledge every time we perform a task- eating, driving, sitting tests or even chatting to people. Yet the physical form of memory has long been mysterious. What changes occur in the brain when a new memory is encoded?
One thing we do know is that memory formation involves the strengthening of synaptic connections between nerve cells. American researchers used sea slugs to demonstrate this, as they became the first to watch memories being made, in the form of new proteins appearing at the synapses.
Where, though, is knowledge stored in the complex brains of mammals? Short-term memories, for example, solving an arithmetic problem like (2 X 4) + (6 X 2) in your head, you need to keep the intermediate results in mind (i.e., 2 X 4 = 8) to be able to solve the entire problem, seem to be stored in two small curled-up structures called the hippocampi, buried deep in the brain's two hemispheres.
The brain pays extra attention to things that frighten us, as remembering them could mean the difference between life and death. The amygdala is known to play a role in stamping this permanent mark. Last year, a Canadian researcher found that in mice they could erase a frightening memory of a noise by killing amygdala neurons whose synapses had recently been strengthened after exposure to the noise. It was the first time a specific memory had been traced to the nerve cells that encoded it. Although, it’s still a far cry from seeing a memory in humans.