LOS ANGELES (KNX) – Jennifer Hudson as a cat once said: “memory.”
You know, that thing that keeps your legs pumping as you walk down the sidewalk and helps you reminisce about the joy you first felt when you ate your first deviled egg at a family cookout.
Dr. David Spiegel at Stanford University School of Medicine defines memory as “our ability to access the residue of previous experiences things we've learned, things we've learned how to do.”
How does our brain process memories?
Let's go back to the sidewalk and the deviled egg. All of these experiences stashed away in our brains aren’t built the same. They fall into distinct buckets of cranial data – episodic memory and procedural memory, according to Dr. Spiegel.
“When you have an experience, the episodic part of it is stored in the middle part of the temporal lobe,” he said. “So, not at the base of the brain in the hippocampus and that's a part of the brain that sets up networks based on experience. So it sets up a series of connections among neurons and memory recall is as associative.”
The procedural memory, he said, is stored in a different part of the brain.
“Motor and sensory cortices (are) higher up in the brain and so when you start to do something, those parts of the brain take over and tell your muscles what to do,” he said.
When it comes to memories, Dr. Spiegel said sleep and emotions play a big role. But how?
For those answers, listen to the full episode of “I’ve Got Questions” in the audio below.
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