PHYSIOLOGY OF MEMORY

PREPARED BY,
MRUDHULA SUSAN BLESSON
WINGS FACULTY
NET & SET HOLDER
M.Sc. SCHOLAR
❖Memory is ones capacity to register, store, and recover information over time, or more
simply, the persistence of learning over time.
❖Memory is the brain’s ability to store the learned effects of its experience
❖Affected by factors like attention, motivation, practice, state of consciousness while
learning something and recalling it, and interference from other events and experiences
❖When you ‘record’ memory and then recall it, your mind goes through this process:
❖Receiving – You get a piece of information that is received through your five senses.
❖Encoding – Your brain converts this information into a form that can be stored. It is
held in your short-term memory first.
❖Storing – You transfer some of the information from short-term memory into the
storage of long-term memory. This can take anything from a few seconds to many
months and can be helped by repeating it over and over again in your mind (known
as ‘rehearsal’).
❖Retrieving – You recall the information stored in your long-term memory.
❖Memory problems can be caused by something going wrong at any of these stages.
❖The way information is stored and retrieved can be very specific to the individual. It often
depends on how important the information is to you, or if there is a strong emotion tied
to the memory.
CHARACTERISTICS OF GOOD MEMORY
• Rapid learning
• Good retention
• Rapid recall
• Rapid recognition
ATKINSON–SHIFFRIN MODEL
• The Atkinson–Shiffrin model (also known as the multi-store model
or modal model) is a model of memory proposed in 1968 by Richard
Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin.
• The model asserts that human memory has three separate
components:
• i. a sensory register, where sensory information enters memory
• ii. a short-term store, also called working memory or short-term memory,
which receives and holds input from both the sensory register and the long-
term store
• iii. a long-term store, where information which has been rehearsed
(explained below) in the short term store is held indefinitely.
SENSORY MEMORY
• When an environmental stimulus is detected by the senses, it is briefly available in sensory registers
• Sensory memory is a brief storage of information in humans wherein information is momentarily
registered until it is recognized and perhaps transferred to short-term memory
• Allows for retaining sensory impressions following the cessation of the original stimulus
• Though this store is generally referred to as "the sensory register" or "sensory memory", it is actually
composed of multiple registers, one for each sense.
• The sensory registers do not process the information carried by the stimulus, but rather detect and hold
that information for use in short-term memory.
• For this reason Atkinson and Shiffrin also called the registers "buffers", as they prevent immense amounts
of information from overwhelming higher-level cognitive processes.
• Information is only transferred to the short-term memory when attention is given to it, otherwise it decays
rapidly and is forgotten.
• Sensory memory can be divided into subsystems called the sensory registers: such as iconic, echoic,
haptic, olfactory, and gustatory.
• Iconic memory, which is associated with the visual system, is perhaps the
most researched of the sensory registers.
• Iconic memory is only limited to field of vision. That is, as long as a
stimulus has entered the field of vision there is no limit to the amount of
visual information iconic memory can hold at any one time.
• Iconic memory only holds information for visual stimuli such as shape,
size, color and location (but not semantic meaning).
• Iconic memory was first studied by the psychologist George Sperling
(1960).
• In his research, Sperling showed participants a display of letters in rows.
However, the display lasted only about 50 milliseconds (one-twentieth of
a second). Then, Sperling gave his participants a recall test in which they
were asked to name all the letters they could remember. On average, the
participants could remember only about one-quarter of the letters they
had seen.
 • Sperling reasoned that the participants had seen all the letters but could
remember them only very briefly, making it impossible for them to report
them all.
• To test this idea, in his next experiment he first showed the same letters,
but then after the display had been removed, he signaled to the
participants to report the letters from either the first, second, or third row.
• In this condition, the participants now reported almost all the letters in that
row.
• Participants had access to all of the letters in their iconic memories, and if
the task was short enough, they were able to report on the part of the
display he asked them to.
• The biggest limitation of iconic memory is the rapid decay of the information stored there; items
in iconic memory decay after only 0.5–1.0 seconds.
• Echoic memory, coined by Ulric Neisser, refers to information that is registered by the auditory
system.
• As with iconic memory, echoic memory only holds superficial aspects of sound (e.g. pitch,
tempo, or rhythm) and it has a nearly limitless capacity.
• Echoic memory is generally cited as having a duration of between 1.5 and 5 seconds depending
on context but has been shown to last up to 20 seconds in the absence of competing
information.
• Haptic memory involves tactile sensory memories procured via the sense of touch through
the sensory receptors, which can detect manifold sensations such as pain, pressure,
pleasure, or itching
• These memories tend to last for about two seconds.
• It enables us to combine a series of touch sensations and to play a role in identifying objects
we can’t see. E.g., Playing a song on the guitar or a sharp pencil on the back of the hand.
• The information which enters through sensory receptors travels via the spinal cord’s
afferent neurons to the parietal lobe’s postcentral gyrus through the somatosensory system
• fMRI studies suggest that certain neurons within the prefrontal cortex engage in motor
preparation and sensory memory. Motor preparation provides a significant link to haptic
memory’s role in motor responses.

• Olfactory sensory memory involves the brief retention of smell stimuli. It’s a type of sensory
memory that allows us to retain and process odors momentarily.
• Gustatory sensory memory is the temporary storage and recall of taste information. It refers
to our ability to hold briefly and process tastes after we’ve experienced them.
• This type of sensory memory is closely linked with olfactory (smell) memory due to the
interconnected nature of taste and smell, and it can powerfully evoke recollections of
specific events, places, or experiences associated with certain tastes.
SHORT TERM MEMORY
• While much of the information in sensory memory decays and is forgotten, some is attended to. The
information that is attended is transferred to the short-term store
• As with sensory memory, the information that enters short-term memory decays and is lost, but the
information in the short-term store has a longer duration, approximately 18–20 seconds when the
information is not being actively rehearsed, though it is possible that this depends on modality and could
be as long as 30 seconds.
• Info can be held much longer through what Atkinson and Shiffrin called rehearsal/Repetition.
• Info in the short-term store does not have to be of the same modality as its sensory input. For example,
written text which enters visually can be held as auditory information, and likewise auditory input can be
visualized.
• There is a limit to the amount of information that can be held in the short-term store: 7 ± 2 chunks.
• These chunks, which were noted by George Miller
• Chunking allows for large amounts of information to be held in memory: 1947831415112001 can be
grouped semantically (meaningful groups) into the 4 chunks Independence day[1947] ate[8]
pie[314→3.14→π] on my bday[15112001]".
 WORKING MEMORY
• Baddley and Hitch, 1974
• borrowed important features of the STM/LTM distinction but incorporated
additional features
• A memory is said to be ‘working’ when it is active and involved in information
processing
• Working memory does more than just hold memories while they are transferred
into a more permanent form
• ‘the system for the temporary maintenance and manipulation of information,
necessary for the performance of such complex cognitive activities as
comprehension, learning and reasoning’- Baddeley
• Baddeley’s working memory model was an active three-part memory system that
temporarily holds information and consists of a phonological loop, visuospatial
working memory, and the central executive. Later episodic buffer was added.
1. Phonological loop- stores information about language sounds with an acoustic
code from sensory memory and a rehearsal function that helps to repeat words
in the loop.
2. Visuospatial sketchpad- stores visual and spatial information from sensory
memory, including imagery, or mental pictures.
3. Central executive- integrates information from the phonological loop,
visuospatial working memory, and long-term memory as old and new
information is associated, solve problems, and perform other cognitive tasks.
4. Episodic buffer- temporary store that integrates information from the other
components and maintains a sense of time.
LONG TERM MEMORY
• The long-term store (also long-term memory) is a more or less permanent store. Information
that is stored here can be "copied" and transferred to the short-term store where it can be
attended to and manipulated.
• Information is postulated to enter the long-term store from the short-term store more or less
automatically.
• Varying amounts of attention result in varying amounts of time in short-term memory.
• Longer an item is held in short-term memory, the stronger its memory trace will be in long-
term memory through consolidation process involving rehearsal anhd meaningful association.
• long-term memory is assumed to be nearly limitless in its duration and capacity.
• This is not to assume that any item which is stored in long-term memory is accessible at any
point in the lifetime.
• Rather, it is noted that the connections, cues, or associations to the memory deteriorate; the
memory remains intact but unreachable.
• It is divided into explicit and implicit memories

• DECLARATIVE/ EXPLICIT- NON- DECLARATIVE/ IMPLICIT

• A declarative memory is for a fact or an event in the world
• The term ‘declarative’ means that humans can verbally declare its content
• Declarative memories can be acquired rapidly and consciously recalled.
• for Another term declarative memory is explicit memory ie., We can be verbally explicit about the
content.

• Non- declarative/ implicit memory cannot be expressed or ‘declared’ verbally

• Non-declarative memory is also termed procedural memory and is automatic and unconscious
• These memories are acquired through repetition and practice – composed of automatic sensory
motor behaviors.
• Once learned, these body memories allows us to carry out ordinary motor actions more or less
automatically.

• The distinction is between knowing ‘what’ and knowing ‘how’

• Declarative memory is divided into: SEMANTIC AND EPISODIC MEMORY
• Semantic memory refers to more structured record of facts, meanings, concepts and
knowledge shared with others and independent of personal experience and of the
spatial/temporal context in which it was acquired.
• May once have a personal context but now stand alone as simple knowledge,
Eg: knowing the capital of france, social customs, functions of objects, vocabulary.

• Episodic memory represents our memory of experiences and specific events in time
in a serial form from which we can reconstruct the actual events that took place at a
given point in our lives.
• It is the memory of autobiographical events that can be explicitly stated,
• Indvls tend to see themselves as actors in these events and an emotional charge is
associated.
Eg: remembering the first day in college
IMPLICIT MEMORY CAN BE DIVIDED INTO:
• Skill learning: Indvl performs a challenging task on repeated trials in
one or more sessions.
• Priming: a change in processing of stimulus, usually a word or a
picture as a result of prior exposure to the same stimulus. Eg: if a
person is shown the word stamp in a list and later asked to complete
the word stem sta…, he is likely to reply stamp.
• Conditioning: Association between stimuli.
 CRITERIA OF MEMORY

Rose (1992) proposed criteria that need to be met for a change to qualify as the
embodiment of memory; five of these are as follows:
1. There must be a physical change at a location in the brain. This will probably be an
increase in synaptic structure but in principle it might be a loss of some synapses.
2. Other factors that accompany learning (e.g. arousal or stress) must be ruled out as
causes of the change in structure.
3. If structural changes are prevented from happening, memory should not be formed.
Injection of chemicals that inhibit protein synthesis should prevent learning.
4. A lesion to the site of memory should disrupt its expression in behavior. (This raises
the issue of whether a particular memory is localized to one site or distributed over
many regions.)
5. The neurons at the site of proposed memory formation should show altered
electrical characteristics
PROCESSES OF MEMORY
1. Encoding/ Assimilation
- Perceived stimuli converted to a code / construct that can be stored
within the brain
- Begins with attention – thalamus & frontal lobe
- Emotion increases attention
- Perceived sensations are decoded in various sensory cortex and
then combined in hippocampus into one single experience.
Types
• Acoustic- within echoic memory; phonological loop
• Visual – amygdala and visual system
• Tactile – somatosensory cortex
• Semantic – frontal and temporal cortex
• Episodic- hippocampus
• Declarative – hippocampus, entorhinal cortex , perirhinal cortex
• Procedural – cerebellum, putamen, caudate nucleus , motor cortex
2. Consolidation
• Process of stablising a memory trace after initial acquisition
• May be a part of encoding or storage
• 2 specific processes : synaptic consolidation (first few hrs after
learning) and system consolidation
• According to consolidation theory, consolidation is a time
dependent process essential for LTM that involves protein synthesis.
• Utilizes the phenomenon of LTP
3. Memory storage
• Retaining of information in an encoded form in brain
• More the info is repeated, more likely its retained
• Rehearsal ‘
• Chunking
4. Retrieval
• Subsequent re-accessing of events or information that was previously encoded and stored
in brain
• Replays a pattern of neural activity that was originally generated in response to a particular
event, echoeing brain’s perception of the real event.
• Recognition: Association of an event with prev experienced; Largely an unconscious
process. Eg; taking a multiple-choice quiz requires you to recognize the correct answer out
of a group of available answers.
• Recall: retrieving info that is not currently physically present and requires direct uncovering
of info from memory. This type of memory retrieval involves being able to access the
information without being cued. Answering a question on a fill-in-the-blank test is a good
example of recall.
• Relearning: This type of memory retrieval involves relearning information that has
previously been learned. This often makes it easier to remember and retrieve information
in the future and can improve the strength of memories.
• The general principle that underlies the effectiveness of retrieval cues is the encoding
specificity principle(Tulving & Thomson, 1973)
• when people encode information, they do so in specific ways.
• For example, take the song on the radio: perhaps you heard it while you were at a terrific party,
having a great, philosophical conversation with a friend. Thus, the song became part of that
whole complex experience. Years later, even though you haven’t thought about that party in
ages, when you hear the song on the radio, the whole experience rushes back to you.
• In general, the encoding specificity principle states that, to the extent a retrieval cue (the song)
matches or overlaps the memory trace of an experience (the party, the conversation), it will be
effective in evoking the memory.
• A classic experiment on the encoding specificity principle had participants memorize a set of
words in a unique setting. Later, the participants were tested on the word sets, either in the
same location they learned the words or a different one.
• As a result of encoding specificity, the students who took the test in the same place they
learned the words were actually able to recall more words (Godden & Baddeley, 1975) than the
students who took the test in a new setting. In this instance, the physical context itself provided
cues for retrieval.
 CORTICAL AREAS OF MEMORY STORAGE
• There was a major push to identify the areas in the brain where memories are
stored.
• Lashley and many who subsequently took up the search used the lesion method.
• If a particular structure were the storage site for all memories of a particular type,
then destruction of that structure should eliminate all memories of that type that
were acquired prior to the lesion. No brain structure has shown this result
• These findings have led to two major conclusions:
(1) Memories are stored diffusely in the brain and thus can survive destruction of
any single structure
(2) memories become more resistant to disruption over time
 BRAIN STRUCTURES INVOLVED IN MEMORY

2. HIPPOCAMPUS
• The hippocampal formation is made up of a group of substructures including the
hippocampus, the dentate gyrus, and the subiculum all of which are located in the interior
of the temporal lobe organized in a similar shape to a letter C.
• Together these structures represent the main areas of the brain associated with the
formation of long term memories. The role of the hippocampus appears to be a dual one:
to act as
(i) a temporary store of information held immediately after learning and
(ii) a site from which consolidation of memory by the cortex is controlled
• The hippocampus is thought to be a fast-learning system whereas the cortex is slower.
• Hippocampal damage disrupts more recently acquired memories, while leaving older ones
intact.
• This suggests that, with time, the cortex is able to consolidate memories but, until this is
achieved, the hippocampus is needed either to store them or to gain access to them
The Hippocampus and Declarative Memory
• Although patients with hippocampal damage acquire new skills, they have enormous trouble learning new
facts.
• Larry Squire (1992) proposed that the hippocampus is critical for declarative memory, especially episodic
memory.
• Here is one example: A rat digs food out of five piles of sand, each with a different odor. Then it gets a choice
between two of the odors and is rewarded if it goes toward the one it smelled first.
• Intact rats learn to respond correctly, apparently demonstrating memory of not only what they smelled but
also when they smelled it.
• Memory of a specific event qualifies as episodic, at least by a broad definition.
• Rats with hippocampal damage do poorly on this task
• In the delayed matching-to-sample task, an animal sees an object (the sample) and then, after a delay, gets a
choice between two objects, from which it must choose the one that matches the sample. In the delayed
nonmatching-to-sample task, the procedure is the same except that the animal must choose the object that
is different from the sample
• In both cases, the animal must remember which object was present on this occasion, thereby showing what
we might call a declarative memory, perhaps an episodic memory.
The Hippocampus and Spatial Memory
• Electrical recordings indicate that many neurons in a rat’s hippocampus are tuned to particular spatial
locations, responding best when an animal is in a particular place or looking in a particular direction.
• When people perform spatial tasks, such as imagining the best route between one house and another, fMRI
results show enhanced activity in the hippocampus
• An fMRI study with college students recorded their responses to photos of familiar campus sights.
• Buildings close to each other on campus produced more similar hippocampal responses than did those that
are farther apart
• Researchers conducted PET scans on the brains of London taxi drivers as they answered questions such as,
“What’s the shortest legal route from the Carlton Tower Hotel to the Sherlock Holmes Museum?” (London taxi
drivers are well trained and answer with impressive accuracy.)
• Answering these route questions activated their hippocampus much more than did answering nonspatial
questions.
• MRI scans also revealed that the taxi drivers have a larger than average posterior hippocampus and that the
longer they had been taxi drivers, the larger their posterior hippocampus.
• This surprising result suggests actual growth of the adult human hippocampus in response to spatial learning
experiences.
• Consider a couple of ways to test spatial memory in nonhumans.
• From a central point, a radial maze has several arms—typically eight—
some or all of which have a bit of food at the end
• A rat’s best strategy is to explore each arm once and only once,
remembering where it has already gone.
• In a variation of the task, a rat might have to learn that the arms with a
rough floor never have food or that the arms pointing toward the
window never have food.
• Thus, a rat can make a mistake either by entering a never-correct arm
or by entering a correct arm twice.
• Rats with damage to the hippocampus gradually learn not to enter the
never-correct arms, but even after much training they often enter a
correct arm twice.
• That is, they forget which arms they have already tried
• Another test of spatial memory is the Morris water maze, in which a rat swims
through murky water to find a rest platform that is just under the surface
• A rat with hippocampal damage slowly learns to find the platform if it always starts
from the same place and the rest platform is always in the same place.
• However, if it has to start from a different location or if the rest platform
occasionally moves from one location to another, the rat is disoriented
• If a rat already learned to find the platform before damage to the hippocampus, the
damage leaves the rat exploring the water haphazardly, like a rat that had never
been in the water maze before.
• It ignores landmarks, including a beacon of light pointing to the platform.
• Researchers observed that the rat acts as if it not only forgot where the platform
was but also forgot that there even was a platform.
• Clark’s nutcracker, a member of the jay family, lives at high altitudes in western
North America.
• During the summer and fall, it buries seeds in thousands of locations and then digs
them up to survive the winter, when other food is unavailable. Pinyon jays live at
lower elevations, bury less food, and depend on it less to survive the winter.
• Scrub jays and Mexican jays, living at still lower altitudes, depend even less on
stored food.
• Of these four species, the Clark’s nutcrackers have the largest hippocampus and
perform best on tests of spatial memory. Pinyon jays are second best in both
respects.
• In short, species comparisons show a link between the hippocampus and spatial
memory.
Hippocampus and Contextual Memory
• Describe something that you experienced yesterday or today. Then describe something you experienced months or
years ago. How do your two narratives differ? The hippocampus is important for remembering details and context.

• A recent memory, which generally depends on the hippocampus. As time passes, memory becomes less detailed, less
dependent on the hippocampus, and more dependent on the cerebral cortex.

• When rats are trained to do something, and then tested again after a short delay, they remember the response best if
they are tested in the same location.

• Rats with damage to the hippocampus, if they learn something at all, show no difference between testing in the familiar
place and some other place.

• Their memory doesn’t depend on context, presumably because they do not remember it

• In humans, recalling a recent memory activates the hippocampus. Recalling an old factual memory may or may not
activate the hippocampus, but episodic memories, because they necessarily include some context details, do activate
the hippocampus.

• In one study, rats learned that when they were in room A, they had to dig in flowerpot X instead of Y to find food, but in
room B they had to dig in flowerpot Y instead of X, regardless of location of the flowerpots within each room.

• Most cells in the hippocampus become active only in a particular location within a room or other setting. Most of those
“place” cells responded much more strongly to their preferred place if the correct kind of flowerpot was in that place
INFEROTEMPORAL CORTEX

• Numerous electrophysiological recording and functional brain imaging studies of

memory have led to the same important conclusion:
❖ Areas of the brain that are active during the retention of an experience tend to
be the same ones active during the original experience
❖This has focused attention on the mnemonic functions of the sensory and motor
areas of the brain.
❖In particular, attention has focused on inferotemporal cortex (cortex on the
inferior temporal cortex, which has complex visual functions)
❖ inferior temporal cortex plays an important role in storing memories of visual
input
❖ Naya, Yoshida, and Miyashita (2001) recorded the responses of neurons in
inferotemporal cortex and perirhinal cortex
❖ Naya and colleagues concluded that this reversed pattern of activity reflected
the retrieval of visual memories from inferotemporal cortex.
AMYGDALA

• The amygdala is thought to play a special role in memory for the emotional
significance of experiences
• Rats with amygdalar lesions, do not respond with fear to a neutral stimulus that has
previously been followed by electric foot shock
• Bechara and colleagues reported case of a patient with bilateral damage to
amygdala could not acquire conditioned autonomic startle responses to various
visual/auditory stimuli but had explicit memory for the training
• there is little evidence that the amygdala stores memories; it appears to be involved
in strengthening emotionally significant memories stored in other structures
• This involvement of the amygdala accounts for the fact that emotion-provoking
events are remembered better than neutral events
• Amydala – mediating influence in stress hormones that activate adrenergic
receptors on memory strength; fear memories
PREFRONTAL CORTEX
• The role of the prefrontal cortex is thought to be that of controlling memory, i.e. retrieving memory
and holding it in a ‘working’ state so it can be used
• Stuss and Alexander (2005) have argued that different parts of the prefrontal cortex play different
roles in memory
• Some regions of prefrontal cortex perform fundamental cognitive process during working memory
tasks, and other regions of prefrontal cortex seem to participate in other memory processes
• Ventrolateral and dorsolateral parts of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) have a role in the utilization of
memory to control cognition and action
• To do so, they draw on (‘reinstate’) memories that are stored in more posterior cortical regions
• This involves maintaining the activity of a memory, i.e. holding it ‘on-line’ so that its content can
be utilized.
• PFC helps to guide memory searches, direct thought processes, plan action and select and
implement encoding, processes that are open to conscious introspection
• The role of the PFC is corresponding to the role of the central executive.
• Although humans with damage to PFC can assimilate new information, they are deficient in
organizing its recall
• The PFC has a role in discriminating true from false memories and its damage can result in
‘confabulation’ (‘false memory’, claiming as true experience something that did not occur)
• Patients with large prefrontal lesions often display both anterograde and retrograde deficits in
memory for the temporal order of events, even when they can remember the events themselves.
• They often have difficulty performing tasks that involve a series of responses
• Humans with damage to PFC experience difficulty in inhibiting inappropriate information, termed
‘utilization behaviour’
• Damage to the regions of PFC indicated is associated with disruption to working memory and
planning (Miller, 2007).
• Non-human primates with damage to the PFC are impaired in tasks that require observation of an
event, its holding in working memory and its use in action slightly later
• Disruption of dopaminergic neurotransmission at the PFC has a disruptive effect on their
performance
• However, a number of tasks that require working memory (e.g. recognition of an object,
understanding speech) remain relatively unimpaired following damage to the PFC.
• Memory can be triggered in an automatic way, driven by stimuli that match the memory.
• This suggests that PFC damage does not disrupt the store of memory (e.g. the sensory attributes
of a memory) and points to this region’s involvement in management of memory, i.e. activating a
memory even in the absence of appropriate sensory input and holding it ‘on-line’.
 CEREBELLUM AND STRIATUM
• Research on the neural mechanisms of memory for sensorimotor tasks has focused on two
structures: the cerebellum and the striatum.
• The cerebellum is thought to participate in the storage of memories of learned sensorimotor skills
through its various neuroplastic mechanisms
• large role in implicit memories (procedural memory, motor learning, and classical conditioning).
• In addition to contributions to implicit memory, conditioned responses, fine motor movements,
posture and coordination, the cerebellum also maintains internal representations of the external
world; timing and coordination of body skills
• Its role in the Pavlovian conditioning of the eye-blink response of rabbits has been most intensively
investigated.
• In this paradigm, a tone (conditional stimulus) is sounded just before a puff of air (unconditional
stimulus) is delivered to the eye.
• After several trials, the tone comes to elicit an eye blink.
• The convergence of evidence from stimulation, recording, and lesion studies suggests that the
effects of this conditioning are stored in the form of changes in the way that cerebellar neurons
respond to the tone
• The striatum is thought to store memories for consistent relationships between
stimuli and responses
• Sometimes this striatum-based form of learning is referred to as habit formation
• Knowlton, Mangels, and Squire found that the Parkinson’s patients, who had
striatal damage, could not solve a probabilistic discrimination problem.
• In contrast, amnesic patients with medial temporal lobe or medial diencephalic
damage displayed marked improvement in performance but had no explicit
memory of their training
 AMNESIA
• The term amnesia means ‘the pathological inability to learn new information or
to retrieve information that has already been acquired’
• Organic or psychogenic causes
• A failure to recall events experienced before the trauma is termed retrograde
amnesia
• a failure to remember those experienced after it is termed anterograde amnesia
• Retrograde amnesia often displays a temporal gradient: the memory for events
nearest the time of trauma is most disrupted, with that for earlier events less so.
• The traditional interpretation of retrograde amnesia is that there has been
insufficient time for events just prior to the trauma to become consolidated
 HUMAN AMNESTIC SYNDROME
• In humans, damage specifically to the medial temporal lobe involving the
hippocampus on both sides of the brain leads to the amnesic syndrome,
consisting of an apparent failure to assimilate new episodic and semantic
information
• It might be more accurate to consider several amnesic syndromes subsumed
under this heading. However, there is difficulty deciding how to formalize such
classification.
• It could be in terms of :
(i) cause, e.g. from an infection that damages neural tissue
(ii) the site of brain damage (e.g. specific region of temporal lobes)
(iii) the nature of the memory loss
Anterograde amnesia
• Loss of ability to create new memories
• Maybe drug induced or may follow TBI
• Damage to hippocampus or medial temporal lobe
• Failure in encoding and storage
Retrograde amnesia
• Unable to recall events that occured before the development of
amnesia
• Damage to other areas than hippocampus
• Causes : cranial trauma, cerebrovascular accident, tumor, hypoxia,
chronic alcoholism etc.
Psychogenic amnesia
• Functional amnesia or dissociative amnesia
• Absence of neurological damage
• Severe stress or psychological trauma
 KORSAKOFF’S SYNDROME
• Korsakoff’s syndrome, also known as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, is a non
progreesive type of dementia/brain damage caused by prolonged thiamine
deficiency.
• Severe thiamine deficiency occurs mostly in chronic alcoholics who go for weeks
at a time on a diet of nothing but alcoholic beverages, lacking in vitamins.
• The brain needs thiamine (vitamin B1) to metabolize glucose, its primary fuel.
Prolonged thiamine deficiency leads to a loss or shrinkage of neurons throughout
the brain
• The symptoms of Korsakoff’s syndrome are similar to those of people with
damage to the prefrontal cortex, including apathy, confusion, and memory loss.
• They also overlap those of hippocampal damage, with major impairment of
episodic memory but sparing of implicit memory
• A distinctive symptom of Korsakoff’s syndrome is confabulation, in which patients
fill in memory gaps with guesses.
 CELLULAR MECHANISM OF MEMORY

• Different regions play roles in different types of learning and memory

• If we are able to associate memory with particular brain regions, in principle it is
possible to associate it with the properties of some of the connections between
neurons that are located in these regions
• Recall that some memories, such as those underlying motor skills, are formed
gradually.
• Others are formed in a single exposure, such as those relating to a traumatic
incident.
• Some memories are very fragile, being lost in seconds if they are not rehearsed.
Others are durable over a lifetime
• The extremes of fragility and durability of memory are encoded in at least two
different forms
a. Patterns of activity in networks of neurons.
b. The strength of connections between neurons
• These are not necessarily entirely distinct forms of storage
• the same networks that are active as a temporary store might have their
connections strengthened as the more permanent store
 CHANGES IN ACTIVITY
By means of a change in frequency of action potentials, how might a circuit of
neurons encode a memory?
• A stimulus (A) sets up a cycle (‘reverberation’) of activity in a circuit of neurons 1–
3 (pattern A). Stimulus B sets up a reverberation in a different circuit (B) and
stimulus C activates circuit C. There is consistent mapping between different
stimuli and different patterns of neural activity
• This is a necessary condition in order to consider neural activity to embody
memory.
• Another necessary condition is that activity can be triggered, even in the absence
of the stimulus that is encoded by, associated stimuli or an attempt to recall a
specific memory.
• It is generally assumed that particular sets of neurons are active at the time a
memory is formed and the same set is activated when the memory is later revived
• For example, neural systems within the inferior temporal cortex are known to be
activated by visual patterns and are believed to play a role in encoding visual
memories of the same patterns.
• The assumption is that memory is translated from the more transient and fragile
form of patterns of activity to the more durable form of structural changes in
connections between neurons
 HEBBIAN THEORY
❖Also known as Hebb’s Rule or Cell Assembly Theory, Hebbian Learning attempts
to connect the psychological and neurological underpinnings of learning
❖Donald Hebb (1904-1985) remains one of the most influential psychologists of
our time.
❖Not only did he extend the work of Lashley, but his ideas continue to exert a
major influence on cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
❖Hebb’s most famous work is The Organization of Behavior, first published in 1949,
which attempts to explain how the structure of the brain gives rise to thought.
❖The traditional view at the time was that behaviour arose from stimulus-response
reflexes, that is, all action was caused by a series of neurons arranged in direct
one-way pathways, which could be activated by a specific stimulus - much like a
knee jerk when the patellar tendon is tapped by a doctor.
❖But, Hebb believed that this idea was far too simple to explain the functioning of
the brain.
• Hebb stated that “When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite cell B and repeatedly or
persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one
or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.”
• Hebb’s (1949) theory postulated that the neurophysiological changes underlying learning and
memory occur in three stages:
• (1) synaptic changes
• (2) formation of a “cell assembly”
• (3) formation of a “phase sequence,” which link the neurophysiological changes underlying
learning and memory
• The “cell assembly” - a set of neurons and their connecting pathways which act together, such
that the stimulation of one pathway will activate a reverberating circuit involving many
connected pathways.
• This extended period of excitation bridged the gap between stimulus and response
• A number of cell assemblies connected by patterned neural activity over time was defined as a
“phase sequence” which provided the basis for a “train of thought” connecting cell assemblies
• The interactions among these three concepts give rise to the common phrase “neurons that fire
together, wire together,” which is to say that neural pathways consistently activated together
become physiologically modified to facilitate future signal transductions.
❖This concept had two important advantages over simple reflex.
❖ Firstly, cell assemblies could be autonomous and continuously active.
❖Secondly, and perhaps more important, Hebb realised that such reverberatory
activity could provide the neural basis for learning.
❖This, in effect, could be responsible for transient or short-term memory.
❖However, Hebb also believed that if this reverberatory activity occurred for long
enough, it would be possible for structural changes in the neurons making up the
cell assembly to take place, which could produce permanent or long-term
memory.
❖The likeliest site for structural change, according to Hebb, was the synapse.
Indeed, a synapse that is ‘strengthened’ as a result of learning is now called a
Hcbbian synapse
❖In other words, co-activation of connected cells will result in a strengthening of
their connection, increasing the probability that the recipient cell will fire if the
presynaptic cell does so.
❖Hebb’s theory was appealing not only because it supported Lashley by suggesting
that memory was stored diffusely throughout the brain, but also because it
provided an explanation of how individual neurons might be modified to encode
and store memory.
❖In short, changes in the sensitivity of receptors, or perhaps increases or decreases
in the readiness of a neuron to release neurotransmitter, could provide a viable
mechanism for neural plasticity.
❖Hebb’s theory also explained how memories could be recalled.
❖In short, once a new activity pattern had become established by changed synaptic
connections, it was easy to imagine it being elicited (i.e. recalled) thereafter by
excitation from the appropriate sensory neurons, or from other reverberatory
patterns.
 LONG TERM POTENTIATION
• In 1973, Bliss and Lømø showed that there is a facilitation of synaptic transmission
following high-frequency electrical stimulation applied to presynaptic neurons. This
phenomenon has been termed long-term potentiation (LTP).
• LTP has been demonstrated in many species and in many parts of their brains, but it has
been most frequently studied in the rat hippocampus
• LTP is among the most widely studied neuroscientific phenomena
• The reason goes back to 1949 and Hebb’s influential theory of memory. The synaptic
changes that Hebb hypothesized as underlying long-term memory seemed to be the
same kind of changes that underlie LTP
• LTP has two key properties that Hebb proposed as characteristics of the physiological
mechanisms of learning and memory.
• First, LTP can last for a long time—for several months after multiple stimulation.
• Second, LTP develops only if the firing of the presynaptic neuron is followed by the firing
of the postsynaptic neuron
• The co-occurrence of firing in presynaptic and postsynaptic cells is now recognized as the
critical factor in LTP
• The neurotransmitter glutamate acts at several receptor types on postsynaptic
membranes. Two of these are particularly important in LTP: the AMPA and the
NMDA receptors
• One theory is that AMPA receptors ‘hide’ inside the neuron
• Occupation of NMDA receptors triggers the movement of AMPA receptors to the
surface.
• When they are at the surface, the receptivity of the postsynaptic membrane to
glutamate is increased and this is the basis of LTP.
• There is evidence for the presence of AMPA receptors below the surface of the
postsynaptic membrane.
• At one level of analysis, LTP might be the biological basis of long-term memory .
• This would suggest that in some cases LTP can remain for a lifetime