How do our brains retain memories for decades?

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An international team from the Human Brain Project has announced a new contribution to the attempts of neuroscientists to understand the puzzling question of how memories are formed and fixed in our brains by understanding the mechanism by which one of the enzymes responsible for modulating neural connections works.

A family of enzymes called adenyl cyclase plays an important role in the process of converting external cellular signals into physical molecules within neurons, altering their structure, which we might call memories, the study said in the journal Computational Biology.

What memories?
To understand the general idea of ​​the study, we can begin by clarifying that memories are physical things being added to brain cells, meaning that going to your grandmother in the old family home and tasting her fun food, carefully prepared tea and her modern conversation means that these stimuli are somehow printed on the cells of specific areas in Your brain.

If you happen to travel to a neighboring Arab country and then decide on your first vacation to return to your grandmother's house again and smell her food before entering, those memories immediately return to your brain to remind you of that happy night you spent there in the past, because it is already material things within the links between Your brain cells.

This happens because the brain is not like any other organ in the body, since its cells are of a special nature.Although its general system is similar to every other cell, it is characterized by the existence of links between each other, these connections are not fixed but flexible, may become stronger and larger between a group of cells, They may become weaker and smaller until they fade, depending on the amount of activity between those cells.

In your brain, connections grow and fade almost every moment. This process is responsible for everything you know, from your memories, to your learning abilities, to how you feel about an incident on the street.

Biology .. Computing
In the new study, scientists looked at the exact role that one of the enzyme adenyl cyclase plays in modulating nerve connections to the striatum region of the brain, one of the areas responsible for memory, behavior and learning.

Enzymes are proteins that act as catalysts, and more precisely, they control the speed of cell-chemical interaction, and thus flexibly control the processes of placing memories in nerve connections between brain cells.

Understanding the role that adenylcyclase plays in changing reaction rates in that region, researchers in this range have been able to move forward one more step to understand how memory works, but there is still a long way to go. Each area of ​​the brain contains many of them, and their chemical mechanisms are very complex.

Because of this complexity, scientists are resorting to "computational biology," a huge scientific domain that combines data science, computer science and applied mathematics with biology, to create a new theoretical range that can help design models that explain complex brain work.

Researchers start collecting data on an area of ​​the brain, and then use it to design algorithms that can predict how that region works. This extends to what we now know as "computer neuroscience" where specialists try to model a mathematical model as a whole brain. They compare mathematical models with brain data.

Since the 1990s, this range has been of great importance, especially after computers have developed unprecedented capabilities. Researchers of this range hope that future quantum computers will help to fully understand the brain, the most mysterious and complex member of our bodies.