Question about memories.

[conuly]

Where do they go when you're not thinking about them? I mean, you don't remember everything all the time, right? Some things you may have trouble recalling (the word is on the tip of my tongue!), but even the things you remember easily (in fourteen hundred ninety two...) you don't remember *all the time*. Most of the time, they're... not there. Your current thoughts are there instead. So where are the memories?

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

Memory is complicated, not too well understood, and the dominant theories change, so I may be a bit behind. But basically - we don't know.

What we do know is that paths you use often get reinforced. This happens physically. practice a skill or keep bringing up a piece of information and that path will have more mylin (I'm blanking on the spelling but anyhow) on it. The purpose of mylin is to insulate the path. This makes the transmission go more smoothly, less data loss, easier travel. So, things that you recall often are easier to recall. The ability to recall a memory can change, but you can reinforce an old path with work. This may relate to the concept of savings, that something once learned, even if completely forgotten, is easier to relearn. This also relates to memories being easier to find if you build numerous associations/different pathways to them.

But is a memory just a pattern in your brain, a pattern of which neurons fire? Or is it something else? There was some talk that memories might actually be chemically stored.

All I do know is that from personal experience, it is possible for those paths to get misdirected. it's possible to have the paths tangled so that they lead to different memories.