Be it your child’s birth or your wedding or even the death of your dear ones, we tend to remember every such occasion in details that touch our life one way or the other.
Thus, be it happiness, fear or grief, we humans are able store, retain, and subsequently retrieve information of an event all stored in our brain.
While, in the late 19th and early 20th century, memory was regarded as one of the paradigms of cognitive psychology, things in recent decades have changed — it has become one of the principal pillars of a new branch of science called cognitive neuroscience.
Call it a marriage between cognitive psychology and neuroscience?
You definitely can, with scientists all set to trace the circuitry of memory in the brain. They have recently discovered that the brain-neurons which get activated during traumatic experiences also store the memory of those events.
Not just that! The study also helped determine the number of neurons an individual memory required.
Regarding the finding important, Michael S. Fanselow, a UCLA psychologist — not involved in the study said,
We’ve never before been able to look at a single neuron that was active during learning and memory retrieval,” he said. “And they were able to show the number of neurons is important in terms of the strength of the memory.
This new discovery will not just help researchers with the understanding of how information is learned and remembered better, but also eventually lead people having impaired memories with better treatments.
