Want to Remember High School?
I’ve always thought that the brain’s memory was a lot like that game Connect Four where each player put round tokens in the top of a tower grid in order to try to get four (red or black) tokens in a row. Commonly the game is a draw because you fill up the slots before anyone can win the game. The only way to to put more tokens in the top is to let the existing tokens slide out the bottom.
Memory is a lot like that – we fill up the memory slots and the more we jam memory tokens in the top of our brain, the more the memory tokens come sliding out the bottom.
Push the memory of last night’s restaurant through the top and out from the bottom pops out the name of our childhood best friend. That just doesn’t seem fair!
It appears that memories aren’t toppling out the bottom of the brain afterall, and in fact they can be access if only by tickling the correct part of the brain. This cool brain blogger Neuroskeptic explains:
“A new paper, however, says different. Philadelphia’s Joshua Jacobs et al report that they found a spot in the left temporal lobe of a male patient, stimulation of which evoked memories of the man’s time at high school. The guy was in his 30s at the time, so these are quite distant memories.”
I had a pretty good high school experience, I think. Maybe some commercial application of this will prove otherwise.
