After a memorable restaurant meal, it’s not only the taste that sticks with you.

Numerous factors, including the aromas, the atmosphere, the sound of the band, and the conversations, combine to create a distinct memory of the evening.

Recalling any of these impressions alone may be sufficient to recall the complete experience in the future.

A new study shows that a complex memory in the brain is also made up of a whole and its parts.

The hippocampus, a part of the brain long thought to be the seat of memory, is where the general experience is kept, while the prefrontal cortex is where the specific details are digested and preserved, according to the study’s findings.

This makes sure that in the future, a single cue will be enough to wake up the prefrontal cortex, which will then call on the hippocampus to remember the whole memory.

The research, which was published in Nature, sheds light on the scattered nature of memory processing in the brain and offers fresh perspectives on the recall process, which is less well understood than memory storage.

Due to technical constraints, it has been difficult to study memory as a distributed brain function.

The Rockefeller University neuroscientist Priya Rajasethupathy and her team created novel methods to record and manipulate neural activity from multiple brain areas simultaneously as mice navigated multisensory experiences, interacting with various sights, sounds, and smells while in a never-ending corridor in virtual reality.

The mice were trained to link various rooms, each of which had a unique combination of sensory stimuli, with either pleasant or unpleasant experiences.

The mice were able to remember the overall experience later on and knew whether to anticipate sugar water with joy or be on the lookout for an obnoxious puff of air when they were prodded by a certain scent or sound.

The experiments showed that the entorhinal-hippocampal pathway, a well-studied circuit that includes the hippocampus and the area around it, is important for forming and storing experiences, but that the individual sensory details are sent to prefrontal neurons.

Later, a different circuit was activated when the mice were exposed to certain sensory features. This time, the relevant global memory was brought back by the prefrontal neurons talking to the hippocampus.

This shows that there is a specific pathway for memory recall, apart from memory development, according to the study’s first author, Nakul Yadav.

These results could change how we treat diseases like Alzheimer’s, where the symptoms are thought to be more related to memory recall than to memory storage.

According to Rajasethupathy, targeting prefrontal recall pathways may be more therapeutically beneficial because there are distinct storing and retrieval routes in the brain.

Image Credit: Getty

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