How does the human brain decide which memories to store?

The brain uses a number of automatic mechanisms to determine what information to retain. Everything else naturally fades away. read more

In a year alone, we experience hundreds of thousands of small events that have the potential to become memories. Yet our brain will only store a certain number of these memories (or at least only allow us access to some of them). read more

“Understanding this system has implications for almost any disorder that affects memory, from schizophrenia, depression, and epilepsy to traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder,” says Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, who studies human memory but was not involved in this research. read more