The brain’s ability to create and store memories is highly mysterious. Memory is not always reliable, but it is still very important for survival. Remembering where food is stored during lean winter months is a necessity for many animals, including chickadees. New research suggests that these birds with perfect memories probably use a system similar to the ones you’ve seen at the grocery store. They appear to memorize the location of each food item using brain cell activity that functions similarly to how a barcode works. Here are the findings: The study was published March 29 in the journal cell.
“We see the world through our memories of objects, places, and people,” said study co-author Dmitry Aronov, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. stated in a statement. “Memory completely defines how we see and interact with the world. Thanks to this bird, we now have a way to understand memory in an incredibly simplified way. “And by understanding their memories, we will understand something about ourselves.”
“Memory Genius”
Scientists have long known that the brain’s hippocampus is needed to store episodic memories, such as where your car is parked or your food is stored. It’s difficult to know what animals remember at any given time, making it even more difficult to understand how these memories are encoded in the brain.
To get around this problem, new research considers: Crocodile tit. Arnoff calls these birds “memory geniuses”, masters of episodic memory. Most chickadees live in cold areas and do not migrate in winter like other birds. Their survival depends on them remembering where they hid their food with the birds in the summer and fall. Create up to 5,000 stashes every day.
[Related: Dogs and wolves remember where you hide their food.]
“Each cache is a well-defined, obvious, easily observable moment in which a new memory is formed,” Aronoff said. “By focusing on these special moments, we were able to identify patterns of memory-related activity that we hadn’t noticed before.”
Hippocampal “barcode”
inside study, The researchers built an indoor arena in their lab inspired by the birds’ natural habitat. During the experiment, the black-tailed tit instinctively hid sunflower seeds in a hole in the arena while the team monitored activity in the birds’ hippocampus using an embedded recording system. The device allowed the researchers to allow the birds to move freely and monitor their removed brains between recording sessions. at the same time, Six cameras recorded the chickadee. An artificial intelligence system that automatically tracks them as they fly and as they hide and retrieve seeds.
“These are very impressive patterns of activity, but they are very short, averaging only about a second,” said study co-author and postdoctoral researcher Selman Chetty. stated in a statement. “If you don’t know exactly when and why they happened, it’s easy to miss them.”
They observed that neurons in the hippocampus fired in unique patterns each time the seagulls stored food in a specific location. Each memory was tagged with a unique pattern in the hippocampus that lit up when the bird retrieved the cached food. The research team called these patterns barcodes because they are very specific labels for individual memories.
“For example, barcodes from two different caches are not correlated, even if those two caches are next to each other,” Aronoff says.
These barcode-like patterns occur independently of other activity in hippocampal neurons. Place cells. These cells encode memory of location in the brain. Each of these pseudo-barcodes remained distinct even in caches hidden in the same location at different times, or in nearby caches created in quick succession.
“Much hippocampal research has focused on place cells. Nobel Prize awarded for discovery in 2014” Aronoff said. “Therefore, the idea in the field was that episodic memory must have something to do with cellular changes. We found that when birds form new memories, place cells don’t actually change. Instead, additional activity patterns exist during food caches beyond those seen in place cells.”
What does this mean for humans?
According to the team, the question remains whether and how these patterns are used by the brain to drive behavior. It’s not entirely clear whether Chickadees activate their “barcodes” and use their memories to decide where to go next.
[Related: Do cats and dogs remember their past?]
In future studies, the researchers hope to see whether birds activate these barcode-like patterns when searching for caches at greater distances or in more complex environments. They also plan to record brain activity while the birds choose which caches to visit.
The research team also wants to know whether this barcoding tactic is widely used among other animals (including ourselves), since memory is an important part of the human experience.
“When you think about how people define themselves, who they think they are, their sense of self, episodic memories of specific events are central to that,” Chetty says. . “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”
