Scientists have found that specifically memories, the ones our brain chooses to store, can influence the risk of developing certain conditions.
It is believed that the brains of people with anxiety and depression tend to store negative memories rather than positive ones.
“This can be a vicious cycle because if you focus on the negative aspects, it exacerbates your depression,” says Robert Logie, professor of human cognitive neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh.
Recent research by Exeter University and King’s College London found that people over 50 who were anxious or depressed at the height of the epidemic experienced a decline in memory function equivalent to the effects of six years of old age.
“Memories are not only essential to our everyday ability to function, they are fundamental to our relationships and markers of events in our lives,” says Jack Mellor, professor of neuroscience at the University of Bristol, who is researching new targets for drug therapies to improve memory. Scientists have now discovered that memories are precisely the type of memories that choose Our brain stored them can influence the risk of developing certain conditions.”
“Memory is not an emotion or a fleeting thought, it’s a physical thing made up of connections called synapses that form between neurons in your brain, and each synapse contains a neurotransmitter (a signaling molecule) that sends chemical messengers across the gap to the next neuron,” Mellor says. These connections between neurons multiply in the hours after the event, before the memory is stored away until you want to retrieve it.”
According to the study, the less something is remembered, the weaker these synaptic connections become, and it becomes difficult to bring the same memory clearly to mind, and when something is remembered, more of these connections will be released until the full memory is complete.
Scientists are still revealing many finer details about how memories work, but recent discoveries suggest we may be very close to finding simple ways to improve our recall.
Research teams from Queen Mary University of London and universities in China and Finland have found that the gut microbiome “the community of bacteria and other microbes that live inside us” may influence the strength of our memory.
The findings, published in Nature Communications in November 2021, and which were based on bees — which have been observed for their ability to remember the location of nectar hotspots — open the door to the possibility that we could influence the efficiency of our memory simply by “feeding” gut bacteria that have been found to increase The event reminds us.
The effect of a high-fat diet on the brain:
Surveys show that dementia, and with it memory loss, is the disease we dread more than ever, but there are other everyday factors that can reduce our memory, from stress to the food and drink we eat and hormonal factors.
Research in mice published earlier this year in the journal Aging and Disease found that a diet full of fats and sugars led to changes in key brain regions for memory, but that these changes could be reversed with eight weeks of healthy eating.
Another study conducted by the University of California found that a sedentary lifestyle would have an effect, too. The study included 35 healthy adults and the results showed that those who spent the most time sitting tended to have thinning of the medial temporal lobe, another area of the brain important for memory, PLoS One reported. in 2018.
The effect of mental activity on the brain:
Researchers from the University of Naples after an experiment in which they took 150 students for cognitive tests before and in the middle of the epidemic, found that their recall decreased.
One problem, Professor Logie says, is that there aren’t enough fun things to remember. “Memory deals with freshness better than normal. Let’s say you go to the same restaurant or park in the same place every day, you won’t remember any of these,” he says. things in great detail.
According to Logy, what happens is that our brain forgets a lot of details efficiently but retains common features. During an epidemic, a lot of what we did became monotonous, so there was nothing new to notice.
Stress contributes to the formation of memory:
A review of 113 studies from the University of California found that if people experience stress during neurocoding, this impairs memory formation, but a short wave of stress can enhance encoding, they reported in Psychological Bulletin in 2017.
Professor Mellor says: “One of the interesting ideas is that it is in the hippocampus [منطقة عميقة في منتصف الدماغ متصلة بالذاكرة]You have a short-term memory that forms during the day and during sleep that travels to the outside of the brain or cortex.”
This highly sophisticated file system tends to explain why you never run out of memory.
Professor Mellor explains: “We think that if it has an emotional significance, if something makes you feel really good or bad, it has a signal associated with it that tells those synapses to reactivate during sleep, helping to alert the brain that you should give it.” Memories priority is the release of certain chemicals associated with memories at the time they are formed, such as feel-good chemicals like dopamine, serotonin or adrenaline at the other end of the emotional spectrum.”
According to Mellor, if something makes you feel good, scared, or very happy, the more likely you are to remember that than something else works in memory.
But some memories are not designed to be preserved, Mellor adds. In contrast to long-term memories, your working memories, the kind of memory that helps you collect numbers in your head or that takes into account the traffic behind us as we pass on a highway, for example, are more fleeting,” rt says.
Professor Logie says: Forgetting is a human superpower, which is why our brains actually outperform the computer, which doesn’t have that ability. Letting go of all the trivial details of our experience, the shape of the apple we were eating, the color of the car we drove, prevents our memory from becoming too cluttered. With useless trivia.”
Source: Daily Mail
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