How does the brain solve problems through memory combination
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Credit: © denisismagilov / Fotolia
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Humans have the ability to creatively combine their memories to solve problems and draw new insights, a process that depends on memories for specific events known as episodic memory.
New research provides a window into the way the human brain connects individual episodic memories to solve problems.
This mechanism allows the retrieval of multiple linked memories, which then enable the brain to create new kinds of insights like these.
“Episodic memories can tell you whether you have met someone before, or where you parked your car,”
says Raphael Koster
a researcher at DeepMind
“The hippocampal system supports this type of memory, which is crucial for rapid learning.”
It is this recurrent connection, the researchers thought, that allows memories retrieved from the hippocampus to trigger the retrieval of further, related memories.
Each individual object and place appeared in two separate photo pairs, each of which included a different face. This meant that every photo pair was linked with another pair through the shared object or place image.
One of the choices the correct one had been paired with the same object or place image, and one had not.
Crucially, the researchers also expected to see evidence that this activity would then pass back into the hippocampus to trigger the retrieval of the correct linked face.
“Using specialized techniques developed in our lab in Magdeburg, we were able to separate out the parts of the entorhinal cortex that provide the input to the hippocampus this allowed us to precisely measure the patterns of activation in the hippocampus input and output separately.”
says Yi Chen, researcher at Otto von Guericke University.
The algorithm was then applied when only faces were displayed on the screen.
If the algorithm indicated the presence of scene or object information on these trials, it could only be driven by retrieved memories of the linked scene or object photos.
“Our data showed that when the hippocampus retrieves a memory, it doesn’t just pass it to the rest of the brain, instead, it recirculates the activation back into the hippocampus, triggering the retrieval of other related memories.”
says DeepMind’s Dharshan Kumaran
The researchers think of the algorithm’s results as a synthesis of new and old theories.
says Kumaran.
“This ability is useful for understanding how the different parts of a story fit together, for example — something not possible if you just retrieve a single memory.”
“If we can understand the mechanisms that allow people to do this, the hope is that we can replicate them within our AI systems, providing them with a much greater capacity for rapidly solving novel problems.”
