“Scientists have known that newly acquired, short-term memories are often fleeting. But a new study in flies suggests that kind of forgetfulness doesn’t just happen. Rather, an active process of erasing memories may in some ways be as important as the ability to lay down new memories, say researchers who report their findings in the February 19th issue of the journal Cell.
“Learning activates the biochemical formation of memory,” says Yi Zhong of Tsinghua University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “But you need to remove memories for new information to come in. We’ve found that forgetting is an active process to remove memory.”
The researchers have traced that process to a molecular pathway including a small protein known as Rac. When that mechanism is blocked, flies hold on to newly acquired memories for longer than they otherwise would.”
Read more at Science Daily
Does that mean that every time I learn something new, some old stuff actually gets pushed out of my brain? Like the time I took that home winemaking class and forgot how to drive?
Damn forgetfullness! i wonder if there would be anyway to prevent “Memory Loss”? .. x
My brain is so clever; it’s already forgotten what this article is about for me!…Or it could be that I’m just distracted by that rather jazzy photo of a fly wearing sunglasses.
so THAT’S where i left my glasses!
Oooooooh, geeezz .. we really did not know about that ourselves yet.
There’s another reason why we forget btw … if the information is not being used by us now and then or seen upon as usefull the brain will start to remove it as well.
I myself am not sure whether it really removes stuff we forget. At times, but at times you only need to refresh it a little bit and it is back, so part of it is still there, otherwise we would need to store (learn) it the same way as before. A vague memory ..
Different states might be another reason why we seemingly forget a lot … around midlife people need to transfer a whole lot to another spot in their brain, or should I say .. we need to get to the information via other brain systems. If this process does not run smoothly .. Layers ..
It’s good that we do have quite a lot of control on this type of processes ourselves. It’s not the brain that normally will decide but we in the first place ourselves. For non-patients a pretty important difference. We hope not to need science ever for those things. Working ourselves, and our brain, from the inside.
Type of memories, locations where they are stored .. all that stuff probably makes the issue already a bit more complicated than has been put out in this article. And so much more structures and things around this which make it hardly impossible to research all of this with the outcome: a positive result and something usefull, to be put once to use.
They keep mapping stuff, or at least ty to map and understand, but whether it ever will be used for something else ?
I think that when we start in life it’s already been determined what we ourselves will need to map in life, what we will need to remember, what we need to wonder about. That contains our drive, otherwise our bodies and brains would not work out, would not be a team. Interaction.
Easy said huh? Ehehe, I speak for myself, I track traced stuff and go back on track, the right track. Sometimes people wil try to get your on to their track, the wrong track mostly for yourselfes. We at times need to work the exact opposites in ourself (if you compare to someon else) to keep driving ourselves.
Oh well, not reallly related to the article, but so much to say there without having to use scientific research for that. It’s pretty interesting. Can be quite usefull. Now.
So as you remember new things you start to lose your memories of old? Well considering I can’t always remember what I was doing this morning, that doesn’t auger well for the future, does it?? lol
LC x
“But you need to remove memories for new information to come in”
In short and mid term memory yes – memories formed in the last five minutes (short term) and six hours (mid term) are routinely erased without being passed into long term memory.. But erasure of long term memories to make way for new ones? That’s a quite different claim, which I don’t think the research was into.