Remembering Memories

About a week ago I was trying to remember the first name of a guy I met about five years back. His last name was definitely Singh but for the life of me I couldn't recall his first name. This went on for about two days and no matter how hard I tried I kept drawing a blank. Finally, one night while in a deep sleep I suddenly remembered his name in my dream.

I've believed for a long time that all our memories are somewhere in our brain it's just a matter of finding them. Now, I'm glad to see that the white-coats are backing me up with some scientific evidence.

From The Frontal Cortex...

What does it mean to forget? Do we actually delete our memories, like an unwanted computer file expunged from the hard drive? Or does the memory always remain, a persistent neuronal ensemble that we just forget how to find?

A new paper in Neuron by scientists at UC-Irvine and Princeton suggests the latter alternative. The forgotten memory doesn't disappear - we just can't remember where we put it.

The conventional assumption is that memory loss occurs because our memories vanish, because cells die and the hippocampus gets tired. But what if memory loss is actually triggered by the steady degradation of the frontal cortex, a brain area associated with memory retrieval? (The frontal cortex starts to lose cell density at about the same time we start to lose our memory - in our mid-thirties.)

This suggests that our memories are still there, waiting to be found, like a misfiled piece of paper. The struggle of aging, then, isn't simply a matter of holding on to the past - the brain has a seemingly infinite hard drive. Instead, the challenge is remembering where all of our memories are.