Tony Bennett, 95 years old, suffering from Alzheimer’s and a living legend of American musical performance, was able to immediately recognize and pronounce the name of Lady Gaga aloud as she appeared splendidly before a passionate audience of thousands of people on the stage of the great Radio City Music Hall in New York. At the same event, Tony easily remembered and performed with the diva the songs that made him famous in his long musical career. However, the next day, sitting on a bench in Central Park with his wife Susan who was questioning him, the singer was unable to remember anything about what might have been, just a few hours earlier, the last concert of his life.
Many people, upon reaching a certain age, are surprised to be able to remember episodes or things in their life that happened many years before, and yet they have great difficulty remembering what they did the day before. What’s wrong with me, am I starting to have Alzheimer’s? Those people wonder fearfully. The truth is that it is not even necessary to have a neurological disease, such as Tony Bennett’s, for that to happen, because, in reality, the surprising and difficult thing to explain by neuroscience would be the opposite, that is, that the elderly only remember the recent and forget what happened a long time ago. Let’s see why.
In March 1894, invited by the British Royal Society, Santiago Ramón y Cajal gave the Croonian Lecturer in London, an honorary lecture reserved only for the greats of Science. Your title The fine structure of nervous tissue it contained the first scientific explanation in history about what has to happen in the brain for us to learn, form memories and remember. He impressed all who heard him by postulating the growth of fine extensions of neurons, which he called dendritic spines (to remind him of the thorns of rose bushes), to establish multiple connections between them. The complex neural circuits that would form these connections became the storehouse of memories, their substrate or material base. The Aragonese understood it before anyone else by opening the doors to the knowledge of what we currently call neuronal plasticity, the ability of the brain to be modified by the experiences we live, something that we have been able to verify, more than a century later, using modern histology techniques. and microscopy.
Thanks to Ramón y Cajal and many later researchers we know that memory is not something ethereal or immaterial, because when we learn the brain changes, modifying its chemistry, its morphology and its functioning, something that happens continuously throughout life. But now we also know that these changes, which involve a marvelous neural machinery of genes and molecules, occur more easily and powerfully when we are young, which explains that as adults we can better remember what happened a long time ago, when the brain had intact that machinery and its power to form and store memories in places such as the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex, that when, later in life, the processes that arise in neurons and their connections are formed with more difficulty, they do not stabilize, and they they fade easily as they are not reinforced by processes such as attention, which also weaken with age.
It is as if what we learned and lived in the past when we were young was sculpted in stone and thus made indelible, while what we learn when we grew up was in soft clay, thus being less consistent and more ephemeral and prone to oblivion. . Homer, the Greek poet author of The Iliad Y The odyssey, considered ideas or memories the result of stamping a hard stamp in hot wax. With soft wax it would cost little to stamp the memory, but it would not be durable. On the contrary, with hard wax the stamping would be difficult, but durable, properties that certainly resemble those of formation and memory of our biological memories. That being the case, the difficult thing would be to forget not what the elderly did yesterday with a weakened brain, but what happened to us when our young brain exerted all its functional power and formed robust and lasting memories.
P.S. The Government of Spain has declared the year 2022 as the “Santiago Ramón y Cajal Research Year” as an event of exceptional public interest.
Ignacio Morgado Bernal is cProfessor of Psychobiology at the Institute of Neurosciences and the Faculty of Psychology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Author of ‘Learning, remembering and forgetting: brain keys to memory and education’. Ariel, 2014 and 2017.
Gray matter it is a space that tries to explain, in an accessible way, how the brain creates the mind and controls behavior. The senses, motivations and feelings, sleep, learning and memory, language and consciousness, as well as their main disorders, will be analyzed in the conviction that knowing how they work is equivalent to knowing ourselves better and increasing our well-being and relationships with other people.
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