Why is it that amnesia patients can’t remember their names or addresses, but they do remember how to hold a fork? It’s because memories come in many flavors, says Fred Helmstetter, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). Remembering what is not the same as remembering how.
“Different circuits in the brain are activated when you remember what you had for breakfast this morning versus when you fell off a bicycle in second grade,” says Helmstetter, who researches the brain’s regulation of memories, emotions and learning.
And it’s those distinctive connections in the brain’s communication network that differentiate between the “aware,” or conscious, memories and the unconscious ones, some of which Helmstetter calls “emotional memories.”
Unraveling the differences between kinds of memories, Helmstetter believes, depends on understanding the chemical changes that happen in the brain at the molecular level.
Helmstetter’s work has already shown how memories are stored in certain neurons. Now he wants to know more about the molecular players that make the brain’s whole network of constantly changing memory connections possible.
Fascinating work. Lots more detail in the article — provokes many questions, directions for research, as well as answers.
Shoot, forgot what I was going to say.
Another piece here awhile ago reported an MRI study showing that Nuns having a religious experience showed increased brain activity in quite specific locations. I wonder if that phenomenon is linked to accumulated memories in some way – maybe religion taps into areas where memories have otherwise become “disconnected”? Just speculating. Very interesting stuff. this.
This is the kind of stuff I love to contemplate.
#5 – Pedro, why can’t you do MRI related research where you are? That seems very strange. Of course, I come from a country where people allow politicians to legislate medical findings. That’s pretty strange too.
I thought tracking specific deep emotions (in this case, religious) to defined “hot spot” brain activity was already interesting. But your idea, if I read it right, of looking for “hot spot” influences on how the brain then processes data – that gets into perceptual differences, how people can draw such different conclusions from the same known facts, how memories and opinions are formed… maybe even the rose-colored glasses of infatuated couples. What a fascinating idea. I hope you’ll tell us more about it. Like, what was the psychologist’s reaction?
I use to work at a lab where each of us had our own locker. Every day for 5 years I would spin that combination at the start and end of my shift. Never even gave it thought. Then one night, the power was out at shift change and I had to work the combination while holding a flashlight. I couldn’t remember the comb to save my ass. My fingers knew the comb, but the flashlight kept them from remembering. After fumbling for 10 frustrating minutes, I gave up and asked the supervisor to look it up in the log book.