Researchers from the University of Southern California in the United States have achieved an important achievement in understanding how the human brain form, storing and summoning visual memories.
In their new study, published on July 8, the researchers used in the Journal of Advanced Sains, the researchers for patients and a model of automated learning to throw a new light on the internal code of the brain that classifies the memories of things into categories, as they are as a file of the brain’s files.
The results showed that the research team was able to read the ideas of the participants by identifying the category of the visual image that is being remembered, through the exact time of the nervous activity of the participant.
This work is essential controversy in neuroscience, and provides promising potential for future brain and computer facades, including assistive devices to restore the lost memory in patients with neurological disorders such as dementia.
The hippocampus is a vital brain region and is known for its role in forming new cross memories such as what and where and when the events of the past occurred. While his function can be understood to encrypt spatial information (where) and time (Matthew), how he enables him to encrypt the world of wide and high -dimensional things (what) is still a mystery. Since the horsepower cannot store everything separately, scientists assumed that the brain may simplify this complexity by coding things in categories.
The research employed the records of 24 patients with epilepsy. The records of these patients allowed the team to determine how to encrypt the fortified neurons of complex visual information, not only through the signature rate, but through the exact time of their activity.
“By working with patients with memory defects, it was very interesting to see current studies reveal a model of nervous foundation for memory formation,” says the director of the nerve restoration Center at the University of Southern California at the Kik College of Medicine and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering and the study researcher Charles Liu.
How does the brain store visual information?
The research team developed an innovative approach to the experimental modeling to reveal this complex process, and the team recorded the electrical activity – specifically the impulses – from the neurons in the fortified in epilepsy patients, and the recordings were collected while patients were associated with the task of “the late matching of the sample”, which is a common technique in neuroscience to test the short -term visual memory.
The associate professor in the Department of Neurosurgery and the Alfred E section says. Man of Biomedical Engineering, participating in the study, Dong Song: “We allowed patients to see five categories of images: animal, plant, building, vehicle, and small tools, then we recorded the hippocampus. On the reference, we asked ourselves a question using our machine learning technique: Can we decipher the category of the image that they remember only on the signal of their brains only?”.
The results confirmed the hypothesis that the human brain already remembers the visible things by classifying them into categories, and that the visual memory categories in which patients were thinking is reinforceable based on their brains.
“It is like reading your fortress to know the type of memory you are trying to form, and we found that we can do this already, and we can decipher the type of image category that the patient was trying to remember with high accuracy,” Song believes.
The essence of the discovery lies in the interpretative memory decoding form that the research team has invented, unlike the previous methods that often depend on the calculation of the average nervous activity over many experiments or the use of pre -determined time accuracy, this advanced model analyzes the “spatial and sedative patterns” of nerve pulses from a full set of neurons, as the study provides evidence that the hippocampus uses a chronological symbol to represent categories The visual memory, which means that the exact time of individual neurons, often, is often a second millimeter, carries meaningful information.
Previous studies often focused on individual neurons, while this research revealed that the combinous neurons groups encrypt the memory categories in a distributed way, as while a large percentage of neurons (70-80%) participated in determining visual memory for a specific category, only short and specific moments within each neuron contributed to this encryption, and this effective strategy allows the brain Storing various memories while reducing energy consumption.
“We can start developing clinical tools to restore memory loss and improve life with this knowledge, including memory auxiliary devices and other strategies to restore nerves, while this result may be important to all patients who suffer from memory disorders, but they are particularly deeply related to epilepsy patients who participated in studies, and many of them suffer from a functional defect in the hippocampus manifested in all of the episodes of epilepsy as well as disorders Cognitive/memory.