What’s your name?: Why forget names?
According to investigators, the study reveals the presence of an important brain circuit previously unknown. It has long been known that these three regions appear to have specific roles in the processing of memories.
The finding has important implications for understanding memory and to help treat people with disabilities of memory, such as those with Alzheimer’s disease. We often forget the name and not the face of an acquaintance, but as demonstrated by a group of scientists, this seems trivial, might help to understand the nature of various limitations of the memory.
According to scientists at the University of Bristol in England, to commemorate the moment a new name or a face many brain regions appear to be working “team”, these areas are the hippocampus, perirhinal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex.
The perirhinal cortex appears to be crucial to our ability to recognize whether an object is known or had never seen. The hippocampus is important for place recognition and navigation, and the medial prefrontal cortex is associated with higher brain functions.
The scientists, who published research in the Journal of Neuroscience (Journal of Neuroscience), conducted experiments on mice to examine the role of the hippocampus in recognition memory tasks. As reported in separate experiments www.bbc.co.uk also investigated how the hippocampus interacts with both cortices, the perirhinal and medial prefrontal cortex.
They found that neither the memory of the “object in place” (where we put our keys) or the “recognition of the temporal order” (where last seen) may be formed if it breaks the communication between these three regions. “In normal everyday life we collect information in this brain circuit, which may also involve other parts of the brain,” explains Dr. Clea Warburton, who led the study.
“If you recognize someone in the store but not remember his name, this may be because we know that we have seen that person somewhere else, perhaps at work”. And this difficulty remembering, adds the researcher, may be due to several reasons.
“The processes can become faulty over age, or perhaps we are too busy to strive to remember, or it may be because a portion of the brain circuitry is not working,” he adds. Scientists say that one way to combat these oversights are paying particular attention to any detail of the name or face of a person, used to repeat aloud the name.
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