Distant Memories

Research carried out at the University of California Los Angeles has discovered how the brain retrieves memories of experiences from the past. It is another piece of the jigsaw that increases our understanding of how the brain, in this case, the brains of mice, works and may be very important if the findings can be shown to occur in humans too.

It means that in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia the potential of knowing what area of the brain is involved in long term memory disruption and loss makes a contribution to future therapies.

It has been known for a long time that the part of the brain called the hippocampus has a role in processing recent memories and it was also known that it did not store the information permanently. Professor Alcino Silva and his team believe that through their research testing the recall of mice, that the anterior cingulate plays a special role in keeping early memories alive and that material called kinase II, is ‘critically’ involved in preserving old memories.

The researchers believe that the anterior cingulated assembles signals of old memories from different sites in the brain. The possibility is that in dementia, as in other diseases that affect memory, there is a malfunctioning in this process and that memory becomes fragmented to the point where they make no sense.