Where is memory stored in the brain?
The researchers found that while the overall experience is stored in the hippocampus, the brain structure long considered the seat of memory, the individual details are parsed and stored elsewhere, in the prefrontal cortex.
The hippocampus is important for remembering details and context. Memories stored here for as long as they exist.
Human memories are stored in several brain regions. The most important is the hippocampus, which is actually a pair of regions tucked deep in the brain and curled into themselves like seahorses.
The left hemisphere appears to retain the meanings of words in memory, whereas the right hemisphere appears to retain more information about a word's physical form.
The brain has three types of memory processes: sensory register, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
The cerebrum contains the information that essentially makes you who you are: your intelligence, memory, personality, emotion, speech, and ability to feel and move.
The nature of amnesia following ECT supports the conclusion that long-term memories are widely stored in the cerebral cortex, since this is the part of the brain predominantly affected by this therapy.
The cerebellum's job is to process procedural memories; the hippocampus is where new memories are encoded; the amygdala helps determine what memories to store, and it plays a part in determining where the memories are stored based on whether we have a strong or weak emotional response to the event.
The human frontal cortex helps mediate working memory, a system that is used for temporary storage and manipulation of information and that is involved in many higher cognitive functions.
And there's no physical limit to the number of memories we can store. That's because new memories keep on replacing the old ones. That happens because new neural connections are formed from lifelong learning.