Eleven maps for eleven rooms: Probing the brain's extensive capacity for storing memories

To explore this issue, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for Neural Computation and colleagues from the Czech Republic and Italy tested the ability of rats to remember a number of distinct but similar locations. Their findings are published in the 8 December edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers tested memory in seven laboratory rats by letting them run around in 11 distinct yet similar rooms over the course of two days. The freely running rats wandered around the rooms in pursuit of chocolate crumbs while researchers recorded brain activity in CA3 place cells in the hippocampus. As their name suggests, place cells are neurons that fire in a specific place.

The rooms were very alike, but the rats still managed to create a separate, independent memory, or a map for every environment, the researchers found. The CA3 place cells the researchers recorded continued to form unique representations for each environment. The researchers also found that these unique representations or firing patterns were stored in the rats' memories so that when the animal was introduced to one of the rooms a second time, the spatial map from the rat's first exposure to the room was reactivated.

"We investigated whether these memories overlapped across some rooms, but all of the memories were completely independent," said the paper's first author, Charlotte Alme. "This indicates that the brain has an enormous capacity for storage. The ability to create a unique memory or map for every locale explains how we manage to distinguish between very similar memories and how the brain prevents us from mixing up events."

Alme says their findings also help explain why a specific memory trick called "the method of loci" works. This technique involves making a connection between things that you want to remember and places that you know quite well. By associating individual memories with different rooms in your house, for example, you can more easily recall what you need to remember by mentally walking through your house and visiting each room.

"Our paper shows that rats (and most likely humans) have a map for each individual place, which is why the method of loci works," she said. "Each place (or room in your house) is represented by a unique map or memory, and because we have so many different maps we can remember many similar places without mixing them up."