The “secret code” the brain uses to create so-called working memory has finally been cracked by researchers at Florida State University and New York University. This type of memory is what allows people to temporarily retain and manipulate information for short periods of time.
You use working memory, for example, when you look up a phone number and briefly remember the sequence of digits to dial, or when you ask a friend how to get to a restaurant and then follow the path there. ‘to the place.
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The study, published in the journal Neuron, says the brain extracts only the most relevant sensory information from the environment and then summarizes that data into relatively simple code.
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Study brain scans to study working memory
To solve the mysteries of working memory, the researchers used a brain imaging technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow to different parts of the brain.
The team used the technique to scan the brains of nine volunteers as they performed a task that engaged their working memory.
In one test, participants viewed a circle made up of grids, or bars, on a screen for about four seconds; the graph then disappeared, and 12 seconds later, participants were asked to remember the angle of the bars. In other tests, participants saw a moving scatter plot move in the same direction and were asked to remember the exact angle of the scatter plot movement.
The group was only asked to pay attention to the orientation of the bars or the angle of movement of the scatter plot, so the researchers hypothesized that their brain activity would only reflect those specific attributes of the graphs. When the researchers analyzed the brain scan data, that’s exactly what they found.
Study brain scans to study working memory. Image: Shutterstock
The researchers used computer modeling to visualize complex brain activity, creating a kind of topographic map representing peaks and troughs of activity in different groups of brain cells. Brain cells that process visual data have a specific “receptive field,” meaning they are activated in response to stimuli that appear in a specific area of a person’s visual field. The team factored these receptive fields into their models, which helped them understand how participants’ brain activity related to what they observed on the screen during the memory task.
This analysis revealed that instead of encoding every detail of every graph, the brain only stores the relevant information needed for the task at hand. When viewed on topographic maps, the brain activity used to encode this information looked like a simple straight line. The angle of the line would correspond to the orientation of the grids or the angle of displacement of the scatter plot, depending on the graph shown to the participants.
These line-shaped patterns of brain activity appeared in the visual cortex, where the brain receives and processes visual information, and in the parietal cortex, a key region for memory processing and storage.
For the researchers, what is crucial is not that the brain decided to use lines to represent the images, but that the representation was abstracted from grids or movement for something else.
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