{"id":103352,"date":"2020-03-06T07:47:54","date_gmt":"2020-03-06T15:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/study-suggests-our-brains-use-distinct-firing-patterns-to-store-and-replay-memories"},"modified":"2020-03-06T07:47:54","modified_gmt":"2020-03-06T15:47:54","slug":"study-suggests-our-brains-use-distinct-firing-patterns-to-store-and-replay-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/study-suggests-our-brains-use-distinct-firing-patterns-to-store-and-replay-memories","title":{"rendered":"Study suggests our brains use distinct firing patterns to store and replay memories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/study-suggests-our-brains-use-distinct-firing-patterns-to-store-and-replay-memories2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In a study of epilepsy patients, researchers at the National Institutes of Health monitored the electrical activity of thousands of individual brain cells, called neurons, as patients took memory tests. They found that the firing patterns of the cells that occurred when patients learned a word pair were replayed fractions of a second before they successfully remembered the pair. The study was part of an NIH Clinical Center trial for patients with drug-resistant epilepsy whose seizures cannot be controlled with drugs.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMemory plays a crucial role in our lives. Just as <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/musical+notes\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">musical notes<\/a> are recorded as grooves on a record, it appears that our brains store memories in <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/neural+firing+patterns\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">neural firing patterns<\/a> that can be replayed over and over again,\u201d said Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon-researcher at the NIH\u2019s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and senior author of the study published in Science.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Zaghloul\u2019s team has been recording electrical currents of drug-resistant epilepsy patients temporarily living with surgically implanted electrodes designed to monitor <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/brain+activity\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">brain activity<\/a> in the hopes of identifying the source of a patient\u2019s seizures. This period also provides an opportunity to study neural activity during memory. In this study, his team examined the activity used to store memories of our past experiences, which scientists call episodic memories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a study of epilepsy patients, researchers at the National Institutes of Health monitored the electrical activity of thousands of individual brain cells, called neurons, as patients took memory tests. They found that the firing patterns of the cells that occurred when patients learned a word pair were replayed fractions of a second before they [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":501,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1495,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-health","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/501"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}