Publication Date:
2008-09-06
Description:
The emergence of memory, a trace of things past, into human consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries of the human mind. Whereas the neuronal basis of recognition memory can be probed experimentally in human and nonhuman primates, the study of free recall requires that the mind declare the occurrence of a recalled memory (an event intrinsic to the organism and invisible to an observer). Here, we report the activity of single neurons in the human hippocampus and surrounding areas when subjects first view cinematic episodes consisting of audiovisual sequences and again later when they freely recall these episodes. A subset of these neurons exhibited selective firing, which often persisted throughout and following specific episodes for as long as 12 seconds. Verbal reports of memories of these specific episodes at the time of free recall were preceded by selective reactivation of the same hippocampal and entorhinal cortex neurons. We suggest that this reactivation is an internally generated neuronal correlate for the subjective experience of spontaneous emergence of human recollection.〈br /〉〈br /〉〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2650423/" target="_blank"〉〈img src="https://static.pubmed.gov/portal/portal3rc.fcgi/4089621/img/3977009" border="0"〉〈/a〉 〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2650423/" target="_blank"〉This paper as free author manuscript - peer-reviewed and accepted for publication〈/a〉〈br /〉〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Gelbard-Sagiv, Hagar -- Mukamel, Roy -- Harel, Michal -- Malach, Rafael -- Fried, Itzhak -- R01 NS033221/NS/NINDS NIH HHS/ -- R01 NS033221-10/NS/NINDS NIH HHS/ -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2008 Oct 3;322(5898):96-101. doi: 10.1126/science.1164685. Epub 2008 Sep 4.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18772395" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Action Potentials
;
Brain Mapping
;
Cues
;
Electrodes, Implanted
;
Entorhinal Cortex/*physiology
;
Epilepsy
;
Hippocampus/*physiology
;
Humans
;
*Mental Recall
;
Neurons/*physiology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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