It had been thought that our short-term memories were formed in the hippocampus and then ‘banked’ in the cortex. Recent research by the team at the Riken-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics has shown that the brain makes two memories simultaneously, one for the present and one for a lifetime.
The researchers were able to switch off the hippocampus and still find evidence of the memory newly formed in the cortex. They experimented on mice, but the research may illuminate how brain diseases work in humans.
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