A new study by scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT provides the most comprehensive and rigorous evidence yet that the mammalian brain stores a single memory across a widely distributed, functionally connected complex spanning many brain regions, rather than in just one or even a few places.
Memory pioneer Richard Semon had predicted such a “unified engram complex” more than a century ago, but achieving the new study’s affirmation of his hypothesis required the application of several technologies developed only recently. In the study, the team identified and ranked dozens of areas that were not previously known to be involved in memory and showed that memory recall becomes more behaviorally powerful when multiple memory-storing regions are reactivated, rather than just one.
“When talking about memory storage we all usually talk about the hippocampus or…
