Scientists have discovered that specific memories, what our brain chooses to store, can influence the risk of having certain conditions.
The brain of people with anxiety and depression is thought to tend to store negative memories rather than positive ones.
“It can be a vicious cycle because if you focus on the negatives, you exacerbate your depression,” says Robert Logie, professor of human cognitive neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh.
Recent research from the University of Exeter and King’s College London found that people over the age of 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 age.
“Memories are not only important to our daily ability to function, they are central to our relationships and markers of events in our lives,” said Jack Mellor, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Bristol. , which is researching new targets for Pharmacological therapies to improve memory. Scientists have now discovered that memories are specific types of memories stored by our brain that can influence the risk of developing certain conditions. ”
“Memory is not an emotion or a short-term thought, it is a physical object 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 through the brain. gap to the next neuron, ”Mellor said. The connections between neurons multiply in the hours after the event, before the memory is stored until you want to retrieve it. ”
According to the study, the less an object is remembered, the weaker these synaptic connections, and it becomes difficult to remember the same memory clearly, and when someone remembers, more of these connections are released until to complete the entire memory. .
Scientists are still revealing many finer details about how memories work, but recent discoveries suggest we may be close to finding simple ways to improve our visualization.
Research teams from Queen Mary University of London and universities in China and Finland have discovered that the gut microbiome, “the community of bacteria and other microbes that live within us,” can influence the strength of our memory. .
The findings, published in Nature Communications in November 2021, and which are based on bees, observed for their ability to remember the location of nectar hotspots, open the door to the possibility that we can influence efficiency from our memory simply by “feeding” gut bacteria that have been found to increase the event we are reminded of.
- The effect of a high-fat diet on the brain:
Surveys show that dementia, and with it memory loss, is the disease we fear most, but there are other everyday factors that can damage our memory, from stress to diet and drinks we eat and hormonal factors such as menopause (increased estrogen levels The enzyme needed to make acetylcholine, a chemical in the brain essential for memory.
Research in rats published earlier this year in the journal Aging and Disease found that a diet high in fat and sugar caused changes in key brain regions for memory, but these changes can be reversed in eight weeks of healthy eating.
Another University of California study found that a sedentary lifestyle will also have an impact. The study included 35 healthy adults, and the results showed that those who spent the most time sitting were more likely to have a thinning of the medial temporal lobe, another part of the brain important for memory. , reported by PLoS One in 2018.
- The effect of mental activity on the brain:
Researchers at the University of Naples after an experiment in which they took 150 students on cognitive tests before and in the midst of the epidemic, found that their memory was reduced.
One problem, says Professor Logie, is that there aren’t enough fun things to remember: “Memory holds freshness more than usual. them, ”he said. things in great detail.
According to Logy, what happens is that our brain is well able to forget many details but common features remain. During an epidemic, most of what we do becomes monotonous, so nothing new will be noticed.
- Stress contributes to memory development:
A review of 113 studies from the University of California found that if people experience stress during neurocoding, it affects memory development, but a short wave of stress can improve performance. encode, they reported in the Psychological Bulletin in 2017.
Professor Mellor said: “One of the interesting ideas is that it’s in the hippocampus. [منطقة عميقة في منتصف الدماغ متصلة بالذاكرة]You have a short -term memory formed during the day and during sleep that travels outside the brain or cortex. ”
This very sophisticated file system tends to explain why it doesn’t run out of memory.
Professor Mellor explains: “We think that if it has emotional significance, if something makes you feel really good or really bad, it has a related signal that tells those synapses to re- activated while sleeping, which helps alert the brain that you should give. The priority of memories is the release of certain chemicals associated with memories at the time they are formed, such as emotion -responsive chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, or adrenaline at the other end of the emotional spectrum. .
According to Mellor, if something makes you happy, scared, or really happy, you’re more likely to remember it than something else happens in memory.
But some memories are not designed to be hidden, Mellor added. Unlike long-term memories, your work memories, the kind of memory that helps you compile numbers in your mind or takes into account the traffic behind us when driving on a freeway, for example, are more fast. ” .
Professor Logie says: “Forgetfulness is a human superpower, so our brain is really superior to the computer, which does not have that ability. Letting go of all the trivial details of our experience, the shape of the apple we eat, the color of the car we drive prevents our memory from becoming too full. In useless trivia. ”
Source: Daily Mail
Source: Arabic RT
