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Asked by anon-106860 to Adrian, Gaia, Jim, Scott on 16 Mar 2016.
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Gaia Andreoletti answered on 16 Mar 2016:
Researchers have shown, for the first time ever, that memories are stored in specific brain cells. By triggering a small cluster of neurons, the researchers were able to force the subject to recall a specific memory. By removing these neurons, the subject would lose that memory.
FASCINATING!
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Jim Barrett answered on 16 Mar 2016:
I’m not sure if you mean in our brains or in a computer, but I’m going to answer about the computer anyway 😉
Memory is usually stored on a computer as tiny little squares which are either ‘on’ or ‘off’. All information is stored in terms of series of ‘on’s or ‘off’s
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Scott Lawrie answered on 16 Mar 2016:
Brains are very hard to understand. How can our brains cope with so much information bombarding us our entire lives?! As our computers have become faster and cleverer over the years, we’ve had to drastically increase the size of their memories to cope (bigger hard drives etc), but our brains chug along happily, never appearing to get ‘full’! What exactly a brain memory IS is hard to say, but computer memory is much easier to understand. Computers just think in binary numbers, so if you can write down enough ones and zeroes (on/off, up/down… whatever) on a big long piece of paper (which really is essentially what a hard drive does!) your computer can remember anything 🙂
Comments
anon-106860 commented on :
If this makes sense, how can you know if it is on or off in computers? How can it tell?
Scott commented on :
Ok so binary (on/off, one/zero, up/down, high-volts/no-volts…whatever) is stored on a hard drive as a tiny bit of magnetic material that a ‘read head’ can magnetically flip up or down. You know how bar magnets have a North and South pole and sometimes you draw arrows pointing out of North and into South? The ‘read head’ changes whether that little bar magnet’s arrow points up of down. Think of the read head like the needle on an old-fashioned record player. The hard drive disk spins very fast underneath the read head whilst the head swings from inner edge of disk to outer. The read head – rather than a needle – has a tiny weeny magnetic sensor in it that can tell if the ‘bits’ on the disk are pointing up or down.
The magnetic technology for this type of magnetic storage was discovered at my machine in the 1980s! 😀
anon-106860 commented on :
thanks for that answer it makes sense now 🙂