Is there a reason for why we forget?
November 21st 2011 17:10
Our memories are wrong at least as often as they are right. At best, they are incomplete, though we might swear other wise. This affects countless aspects of our lives, and in many cases our memories — true or false — affect others’ lives.
Perhaps the most exciting neuroscience discovery of the last several decades is that our brains are not static hunks of tissue but flexible and adaptive organs that change throughout our lives. The term used to describe this new understanding is brain plasticity. The flexibility of your brain is essential to memory and indispensable to learning. Specifically, the “plastic” parts of our brain are synapses — the connection points that allow neurons to transmit signals between each other. Hyper-magnification of synapses in an adult human brain shows various sizes and shapes, some shaped like mushrooms, others shaped more like small hills and others shaped like broad-based mountains. The incredible part is that in your brain and mine, synapses are morphing from one shape to the next depending on the need — how fluid the connection between neurons needs to be, for example — and this continues happening throughout our lives.
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