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General anesthesia evokes a dual mystery: How does it disrupt consciousness, including sensory perception, and what might that say about the nature of consciousness.
MIT researchers have found that information is stored not by persistent neural activity, but by the pattern of the connections, or synapses, formed among neurons.
Findings support modern thought that neural networks store information by making short-term alterations to the synapses. The study sheds new light on short-term synaptic plasticity in recent memory storage.
They contradicted the traditional alternative that memory is maintained by neurons remaining persistently active, like an idling engine.While both the models allowed for information to be held in mind, only the versions that allowed for synapses to transiently change connections, or short-term synaptic plasticity, produced neural activity patterns that mimicked what was actually observed in real brains at work, the study said.The idea that brain cells maintain memories by being always on may be simpler, acknowledged senior author Earl K.
Scientists have uncovered details about the functioning of the working memory, throwing light on how information is 'held' in the brain.