Revealing the operating mechanism of the brain to maintain memory, Chinese scientist "Cell" published an article

When you hear a string of unfamiliar phone numbers or numeric passwords, you need your brain to remember them briefly before entering the phone

A few days ago, a research paper published online in the top academic journal "Cell" revealed to us how the brain works behind short-term memory

"When we remember certain things, neurons in the prefrontal cortex will have continuous electrical activity

In order to solve this mystery, in this study, Professor Li Nuo’s team designed a simple task for mice that requires short-term memory: first use the whiskers to identify the location of the tactile stimulus (front or back), and then lick the straw Report your actions (left or right), and get rewards if they are correct

At the same time, the researchers simultaneously recorded the electrical activity of a large population of neurons in the left and right prefrontal cortex of the mice

▲When the mice perform short-term memory tasks, the prefrontal cortex of the left and right sides of the brain exhibited a highly consistent continuous neural activity (picture source: reference [1])

They found that during the memory process, the left and right hemispheres of the brain each have a copy of neural activity that represents memory information

In order to further understand how the left and right hemispheres of the brain are coordinated, the researchers used optogenetics to interfere with one side, directly inhibiting the activity of thousands of neurons, and observing the consequences

This gave the researchers an unexpected discovery: when the nerve activity of one side is disturbed, the other side will maintain continuous activity.

▲The independent modular organization ensures that the memory can be kept coherent in the presence of local disturbances (picture source: reference [1])

The researchers concluded that these results indicate that the brain has increased robustness through modular organization, allowing the brain to withstand a certain degree of injury and protecting important cognitive functions from damage

Reference materials:

[1] Guang Chen et al.

[2] Blocking communication key tosupporting proper communication in the brain.