Neural Mechanisms In Mouse Brains Indicate We Actively Forget As We Learn (medicalxpress.com) 25
An anonymous reader writes from an article on MedicalXpress: They say that once you've learned to ride a bicycle, you never forget how to do it. But new research suggests that while learning, the brain is actively trying to forget. "This is the first time that a pathway in the brain has been linked to forgetting, to actively erasing memories," says Cornelius Gross, who led the work at EMBL. At the simplest level, learning involves making associations, and remembering them. Working with mice, Gross and colleagues studied the hippocampus, a region of the brain that's long been know to help form memories. Information enters this part of the brain through three different routes. As memories are cemented, connections between neurons along the 'main' router become stronger. When they blocked this main route, the scientists found that the mice were no longer capable of learning a Pavlovian response -- associating a sound to a consequence, and anticipating that consequence. But if the mice had learned that association before the scientists stopped information flow in that main route, they could still retrieve that memory. This confirmed that this route is involved in forming memories, but isn't essential for recalling those memories. The latter probably involves the second route into the hippocampus, the scientists surmise. But blocking that main route had an unexpected consequence: the connections along it were weakened, meaning the memory was being erased.
Which is why (Score:3)
We also forget as we remember (Score:1)
This type of research has also shown that the act of remembering can can memory loss/corruption if the memory isn't stored correctly after recall. This failure can become a feature with certain drugs and facing your fears. Afterward, your phobia free. Interesting stuff.
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Good thing we have Human brains and not mouse brains.
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I am not a neuroscientist, but given what we know about artificial neural networks, it seems to me that forgetting has to be a necessary part of the learning process - allowing neural pathways to be reconfigured to whatever you are learning.
We know with artificial neural networks, that training towards one goal necessarily comes at the expense of other goals - and for a given network, the more different patterns it has to be able to recognize, the harder the training is and the more error prone the recognit
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This. A thousand times this!
Forgetting is to remembering as addition of negative numbers is to addition of positive numbers!
If you cannot forget, you cannot learn either.
it indicates mice, not humans, actively forget (Score:2)
Homer Simpson was Right (Score:2)
Remember when I took that home wine-making course and I forgot how to drive? - Homer Simpson
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Does that mean ... (Score:2)
Does that mean that if we kill all mouses then we will have a better memory?
Article stinks! (Score:2)
Comparing riding a bicycle with associations and related memories is like comparing apples to oranges.
Cerebellum (old and small brain part close to brain stem at the back) is managing balance, movement coordination etc. required to use a bicycle, walk, run, reach, grasp.
This sure is not information stored and related to hippocampus, association and forgettable stuff there.
PS.: That's why neck shots in humans and bolts in necks of slaughter animals totally take down an organism immediately for good - brain s
You actively forget some experiences! (Score:1)
From my limited 'unkind' interrogations by others, I know I work to actively forget what happened and erase it from the 'mind index' of learned things.
Wait what? (Score:1)
Andy Rooney was right (Score:2)
I saw him say this on "60 Minutes" years ago: https://books.google.com/books... [google.com]