IN THE Harry Potter films, they are silver streams that can be teased from the head with the tip of a wand. In the Pixar movie Inside Out, they are small glowing balls, stored in vast racks of shelving in our minds. But what does a memory really look like? How does your brain take information from the outside world and cache it for later retrieval? Where are your brain’s storage vaults, what do they look like and how do they work?
Master your memory
The truth about memory is far more elaborate than we previously thought. Here’s your guide to how it really works
A lot of us would be intrigued to know the answers to such questions – yet they are surprisingly hard to come by. Memory researchers have often seemed to take a piecemeal approach. Some focus on the minute details of what goes on in connections between brain cells. Others try to understand the subjective experience of memory – such as how, for Marcel Proust, the taste of a madeleine cake invoked detailed scenes from his childhood. However, they seldom consider the bigger picture of how the brain changes when we create a new memory.
Yet surely the answers must be out there – so I began a quest to find out what a memory really looks like. My aim was to see what goes on inside my head when I relive an experience or recall a fact but I also discovered a lot more. Memories, it seems, are the ghosts in the machine that make each of us unique.
Some early seminal work on memory was done…
