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The hippocampus and surrounding regions in the medial temporal lobe of the brain are critical for memory, but it has remained unclear to scientists how activity across these regions is dynamically organised to link different stages of memory processing.
A team of researchers in the Brain Network Dynamics Unit, at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience (NDCN), in collaboration with the Brain and Cognition Research Center, CNRS, Toulouse, France set out to understand how the human brain coordinates memory across time, from learning an experience to storing it and later recalling it.
Existing knowledge on this subject has come largely from studies using animal models, where faster brain rhythms are thought to structure memory-related activity. However, human brain activity appears slower and more variable and it has remained unclear whether there is a unifying mechanism in humans that organises brain activity across these memory stages.
DPhil student Adrien Causse, first author on the paper, explains: “We found that the brain uses short bursts of slow activity to coordinate how memories are formed and stabilised. The same patterns seen during learning are later reactivated during rest, with the strength of this ‘reactivation’ predicting how well participants later remembered the information.”
Professor David Dupret, co-senior author on the paper, adds: “This study shows that human memory processing is not continuous, but organised into brief moments where brain activity becomes synchronised across regions on demand. These moments appear to link learning with the later strengthening of memories.”
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences website.