Decoding the unique neural "fingerprint" in human memory may
help treat diseases such as Alzheimer's
Science and Technology Daily (Reporter Feng Weidong) Although the general structure and organization of the human brain are universal, a new study published in Nature Communications recently shows that brain activity can be used to observe and quantify how people reimagine common scenarios. These unique neurological characteristics can ultimately be used to understand, study and even improve the treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
When people imagine similar types of events, everyone will do different things because they have different experiences.
Research by the Del Monte Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Rochester in the United States has shown that it can decode complex information related to the human brain and determine the unique neural "fingerprints" in each person's memory.
The researchers asked 26 subjects to recall common scenarios, such as driving a car, attending a wedding, or eating in a restaurant.
These scenarios are broad enough that each participant will reimagine them in a different way.
The participant’s verbal description is mapped to a computational language model that approximates the meaning of words and creates a digital representation of the context.
They were also asked to rate various aspects of memory, such as the degree of association with sound, color, movement, and different emotions.
Then, the subjects were placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging device (fMRI) and asked to reimagine the experience, while the researchers observed which areas of the brain were activated.
Using fMRI data and the subject’s verbal description and scoring levels, brain activity patterns related to the person’s experience can be isolated.
For example, if the subject imagines a red light in the scene, the brain regions related to recall movement and color are activated.
The researchers used these data to build a functional model of each subject's brain, essentially creating the unique characteristics of their neural activity.
Researchers were able to identify multiple areas of the brain, which are the hubs for processing information from the entire brain network, which helps to recall people, objects, locations, emotions and feelings.
They can also observe how the activation patterns in these networks differ at various levels, depending on the details of each person's memories and imagination.
Researchers say that one of the goals of cognitive science is to understand how the human brain represents and manipulates memory.
This study shows that fMRI can observe brain activity with enough signals to identify meaningful interpersonal differences in neural representations that reflect each person’s unique experience.
Studies have shown that with age, many key areas identified tend to decline in function and are prone to degeneration caused by diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease. These findings are expected to lead to new methods for diagnosing and studying memory deficit-related diseases (such as dementia, schizophrenia, and depression), and even adopting personalized treatment and predicting which treatment will be more effective.