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Engrams emerging as the basic unit of memory:
Though scientist Richard Semon introduced the concept of the "engram" 115 years ago to posit a neural basis for memory, direct evidence for engrams has only begun to accumulate recently as sophisticated technologies and methods have become available. In a new review in Science, Professors Susumu Tonegawa of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT and Sheena Josselyn of the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and the University of Toronto describe the rapid progress they and colleagues have been making over the last dozen years in identifying, characterizing and even manipulating engrams, as well as the major outstanding questions of the field.
Experiments in rodents have revealed that engrams exist as multiscale networks of neurons. An experience becomes stored as a potentially retrievable memory in the brain when excited neurons in a brain region such as the hippocampus or amygdala become recruited into a local ensemble. These ensembles combine with others in other regions, such as the cortex, into an "engram complex." Crucial to this process of linking engram cells is the ability of neurons to forge new circuit connections, via processes known as "synaptic plasticity" and "dendritic spine formation." Importantly, experiments show that the memory initially stored across an engram complex can be retrieved by its reactivation but may also persist "silently" even when memories cannot be naturally recalled, for instance in mouse models used to study memory disorders such as early stage Alzheimer's disease.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday January 07 2020, @09:09PM (1 child)
They are stored in both the neurons and the way the neurons are connected. Neither can exist without the other and still store useful information. That this is not blindingly obvious is a failure of both curiosity and basic cognition (bad neural net??? :-).
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @08:53AM
There are alternate possible explanations. For example memories could be stored in a neuron/computer but how accessible a memory/computer is or how it's accessible to other neurons/computers can be dependent on how it's connected to them, and how good the connections are.
Yes an isolated computer may not be as useful as a connected computer but that's just moving the goal post. It's not about usefulness or ease of recall, it's about where those memories are stored.
So what makes you so sure that memories are stored as relations between neurons? Where's your proof? Saying it's blindingly obvious isn't proof, especially when there are alternate explanations that haven't been disproven. Not saying those alternate explanations are true, but have they really been eliminated as possibilities?