The Mystery of the Human Body, How Does the Brain Remember Phone Numbers?

Imagine you are in an urgent situation, must contact someone, but the mobile power is weak. You only have a little time to remember the telephone number. When it's like this, the thing that the brain needs is working memory or working memory . This is a very reliable brain system for temporarily remembering important information. According to neurologist or neurologist Earl Miller of the MIT Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Christos Constantinidis at Wake Forest School of Medicine, working memory is the content of our minds and the core components of cognitive function that play a role in planning, language, and intelligence. Both agree that working memory is very important for everything the brain does. Someone who has a problem in working memory is very likely to experience problems with brain disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Even so, about how working memory does its work is still debated by experts, especially Miller and Constantinidis.

both of them present evidence that can corroborate their respective hypotheses at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego last week. Constantinidis supports the so-called standard working memory model, a model that has existed for decades. He said, when we want to store new and important information such as telephone numbers, neurons in the front of the brain will continue to shoot and work very actively. "And this is a continuous activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex that allow you to retain information in memory," Constantinidis said. If the neuron stops working, then the information can disappear completely. However, this idea was immediately denied by Miller. He said that working memory is not that simple.

Tim Miller used the latest technology to study groups of neurons in working memory. They found that the shots carried out by neurons were not carried out continuously, but were only brief and coordinated. "This may sound normal, but the functional implications are very large," Miller said. One implication, the brain must have many ways to maintain information in working memory during the activity of neurons working actively. Miller's hypothesis, neurons in working memory communicate with other parts of the brain, including tissues involved in long-term memory. The working memory communicates by firing neurons together at a certain frequency, which leaves a temporary "impression" of information in the vast network of brain cells.

The Miller model will allow information from working memory to be stored in a latent form, such as long-term memory stored. And that can explain how we can remember telephone numbers. "If you drop coffee while on the phone, activity in the brain will switch to falling coffee. And because this memory is stored in a latent form, they can be reactivated," he explained. If working memory really interacts with other parts of the brain, it can explain how the area involved in planning and decision-making can control what information remains in the working memory and what is deleted. "This opens up the most difficult puzzle. But the most interesting question about working memory is how do we control our own thoughts?" asked Miller.

Constantinidis admitted that the working memory model developed by Miller was very interesting on a theoretical basis while at the same time explaining some things that were difficult to explain the standard model. "The problem is that so far there has been no experimental evidence linking critical variables to human behavior," Constantinidis said. Constantinidis gave an example, laboratory experiments show that the number of rhythmic shootings that occur does not seem to have much effect on working memory performance. Also Miller's opinion that working memory related to long-term memory seems to contradict the experience of doctors with patients whose brains have been injured, Constantinidis said. "We have clinical cases of patients for whom working memory is very disturbed and their long-term memory is still intact," he said. So for now, Constantinidis remains steadfast in its stance with the standard model. However, he continued to accept the views delivered by Miller. "That's what we do as scientists," he said. "We are trying to explore a problem with a variety of theories and that is fun," he added. Although it is not yet clear how working memory does its job, the more experiments that neuroscientists do will increasingly show the truth.