The fact that a chickadee can remember and return to some 80,000 hidden food items says 1) that a bird brain can be dense with memories, and 2) that those memories are stored in the brain with some kind of spatial mapping--a neurological representation of the bird's territory and locations within it where food will be found. 💬
HOW DO WE CREATE MEMORIES IN 3D SPACE?
THINK ABOUT about how you think, how you store and then retrieve memories? What does that feel like to you when you are LOOKING for a memory?
Do you imagine yourself wandering a vast card catalogue in the Library Of the Mind, searching a seeming-infinite cabinets and mental drawers for that elusive song title or name to go with a face you clearly see in your mind's eye? (You may actually gaze unfocused as if searching visually in head-space for your records.)
Rows and columns, cabinets and folders. Memories of names or places, close together or far apart. Are you getting nearer to finding what you're looking in the folder of LAST NAMES or image gallery of Fern species? You mind has laid these out in their own grids, unique to you and your memories. How?
PLACE and GRID CELLS & THE MAP IN YOUR BRAIN
Recent (Moser 2014 Nobel Prize) and many later brain studies have identified the "GPS of the brain." This sheds considerable light on mental map making. 💬
Very specific populations of cells--now known as place cells, grid cells, border cells and head direction cells-- provide spatial coordinates (like GPS only in brain cells and not on a silicon memory chip) when a rat navigates a maze, or you try to remember and find the right exit from the Mall, and after that, your car in the parking lot. Good luck with that.
Your brain (and the chickadee's) maps memories in very precisely laid out hexagonal patterns of neuron organization in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex--brain regions being studied to better understand this important aspect of learning.
This is new terrain in the study of how our brains record the WHERE and the WHEN of our lives. 💬
Can we use this new information to learn to create better maps? To prevent memory decline in aging brains? The ancients used the LOCUS SYSTEM to memorize epic poems by placing memories in known places. These recent findings may explain why that method works so well.
💬 RELEVANT READING
How the 2014 Nobel Prize Winners Found the Brain's Own GPS - Scientific American
Scientists Discover 'Time Cells' In the Brain That Enable 'Mental Time Travel'
BONUS (or PENALTY) depending….concluding thoughts on a reflection on memory and its future from Fragments from Floyd, 2009.