Remember:

What is a sensory system?

Answer. Sensory system - part of the nervous system responsible for the perception of certain signals (so-called sensory stimuli) from the environment or internal environment. The sensory system consists of receptors, neural pathways, and parts of the brain responsible for processing the received signals. The best known sensory systems are vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell. With the help of the sensory system, you can feel such physical properties like temperature, taste, sound or pressure.

Analyzers are also called sensor systems. The concept of "analyzer" was introduced by the Russian physiologist I.P. Pavov. Analyzers (sensory systems) are a set of formations that perceive, transmit and analyze information from the environment and internal environment of the body.

Questions after § 34

What brain structures are responsible for memory formation?

Answer. The following brain structures are responsible for memory - the hippocampus and the cortex:

The cerebral cortex - is responsible for the memory of impressions perceived through the senses, and the association between sensations;

Hippocampus - links together facts, dates, names, impressions that have emotional significance.

Moreover:

The cerebellum - it is involved in the formation of memory during repetition and the development of conditioned reflexes;

The striatum is a collection of structures in the forebrain involved in habit formation.

How does the memory web work?

Answer. There is a memory switch that can bring back the right memories. At the same time, the nerve nodes of the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus are activated. Such connections constitute the "web of memory". The more connections, the more "web".

How are sensory, short-term and long-term memory related?

Answer. Basic memory processes: memorization, preservation and reproduction. Based on the duration of these processes, there are three types of memory. Sensory or instant memory contains information received from receptors. It retains traces of exposure for a very short time - from 0.1 seconds to several seconds. If the received signals do not attract the attention of the higher parts of the brain, the traces of memory are erased and the receptors perceive new signals. If the information from the receptors is important, it is transferred to short-term memory. It stores information about which a person thinks at the moment. If the information is not re-entered, it will be lost. Only memories that are reinforced by repetition or associated with other memories enter long-term memory, where hours, months, or years can be stored.

How does memory develop?

Answer. Involuntary memory is formed without conscious control. Thanks to such memory, a large part of a person's life experience is acquired. Arbitrary memory includes consciousness, requires volitional efforts, since a person sets himself the goal of remembering the necessary information. Motor or motor memory is the memorization and reproduction of various movements, the basis of motor skills. Verbal-logical memory allows you to remember and reproduce thoughts, expressed in words and other signs. Thanks to this type of memory, a person operates with concepts, understands the meaning of the acquired information. Figurative memory allows him to save and reproduce visual, auditory, olfactory images. Emotional memory is the memory of feelings. It is known that what is associated with positive or negative emotions is better remembered. All types of memory are closely interconnected.

My daughter went to first grade and was faced with the fact that the rules had to be memorized. It was very difficult for her at first. Even if she could repeat the entire text in the first hour after memorization, then some of the information was lost later. And I remembered these rules by heart from school.

Then my little genius asked a completely logical and wise question: “Why can’t I remember the rule that I learned today, and you still know it?”. I was in no hurry to answer - I decided to study the theory and compare it with life experience.

I started my research from the basics. What is memory? Where is human memory stored? What is the structure of memory?

According to the definition, this thinking process, consisting of the following components: memorization, storage, reproduction and forgetting.

How does memory work? It is formed throughout life and stores our life experience. Physically, the process can be described by the emergence of new connections between a huge number of brain neurons.

The processes in the brain are not fully understood, and scientists continue research in this area of ​​the human body.

The location of human memory is still debated. To date, it has been proven that the following areas of the brain are responsible for this part of consciousness: the subcortical hippocampus, hypothalamus, thalamus, and cerebral cortex.

The main storage sites are the hippocampus and the cortex. The hippocampus is located in the temporal lobe on both sides of the brain. To the question of which hemisphere is responsible for memory, we can safely answer that both, only the right lobe “controls” factual and linguistic data, and the left lobe controls the chronology of life events.

The appearance of neural connections is due to the work of the receptors of the sense organs: vision, taste, smell, touch and hearing. The brain captures all the electrical impulses from them, and the brightest moments that cause strong emotions (for example, first love) are remembered better.

Thus, human emotions affect memory.

In each person, the predominance of a memory property through any sense organ is possible.

For example, some learn the text well from the textbook when reading, others are better off hearing the text from another person, others have an excellent memory for smells, and so on.

Various external and internal factors affect the "quality" of our memory. There are many reasons that cause violations of this process.

Internal causes include incorrect handling of information in the following areas:

• memorization - so that the information is not forgotten, you need to work with it;
• interference - a large number of new information leads to forgetting important previously acquired information;
• repression - negative memories are forgotten faster;
• distortion - the memorization and reproduction of information occurs against the background of our feelings and emotions, therefore such processing makes the data subjective;
• storage and reproduction errors - if the data is remembered with errors or inaccuracies, or not completely, then their reproduction will be incorrect.

External reasons are also enough:

1. Genetic disorders (for example, autism).
2. Hormonal disorders (including diabetes mellitus, thyroid pathology).
3. Depressive or stressful conditions and diseases (neurosis, schizophrenia).
4. Exhaustion of the body caused by overwork, insomnia, illness, poor diet, alcoholism, smoking, taking certain drugs (for example, benzodiazepines).
5. Age-related changes (Alzheimer's disease).

Especially detrimental, in addition to diseases and injuries, alcohol addiction affects memory. It is known that even a single use of alcohol leads to disorders, and in alcoholism, the destruction of neural connections in the hippocampus, impaired cerebral circulation, and the occurrence of vitamin deficiency occur.

All this leads to a loss of the ability to assimilate new information.

Acute conditions such as stroke and heart attack can also cause the destruction of neural connections, and the consequences can be enormous, and recovery takes a lot of time, effort and patience. Sometimes all attempts are unsuccessful.

The hippocampus contains a substance - acetylcholine - responsible for the transmission of impulses from one neuron to another. Its deficiency causes memory impairment. This phenomenon is especially observed in old age and causes Alzheimer's disease.

Structure

A long study of how human memory works led to the creation of a detailed classification. One of the criteria is the duration of information storage. According to it, the following types of memory can be distinguished:

• instant (touch);
• short-term;
• operational;
• long-term.

Instantaneous is characterized by the fact that information is fixed by the receptors of the sense organs, but cannot be processed. It, in turn, is divided into iconic (visual perception) and echoic (auditory perception).

An example of an iconic view - you see a banner with an advertisement and a phone number on the street, in a second you will not remember this number. The echoic view can also be seen on advertising, but you did not see the phone number, but heard it on the radio. Instant memory allows you to store information up to 5 seconds.

Short-term is the consequence of a single perception and immediate reproduction. If we take an example with the rule for the first grade, when the daughter reads it syllable by syllable once without repetition. She will be able to keep the rule in memory for a period of time from 5 seconds to one minute.

The hippocampus is responsible for short-term memory. The evidence is the fact that when the hippocampus is damaged (during surgery, for example), a person immediately forgets the event that just happened to him, but remembers the information accumulated before the damage.

Working memory is the same as short-term memory, but information is stored only within the period of its use. For example, the daughter read the rule and used it to complete the exercise from homework, and then forgot.

This type allows a person to quickly solve a problem here and now and forget later unnecessary information.

Long-term stored in the cerebral cortex. It develops simultaneously with the short-term and is its consequence. After repeated memorization and application of information that is within short-term memory, it is fixed in the brain, namely in the cerebral cortex, for a long time or even for life.

This is an example where a rule learned in first grade and applied throughout 11 years of schooling is remembered forever. Long-term memory requires the participation of all resources of consciousness: mental, sensual and intellectual.

Only conscious and fully meaningful information can take a place in a person's long-term memory.

The structure of memory is simplified as follows: memorization - storage - reproduction. When memorizing, new neural connections are built.

Thanks to these connections, we remember (reproduce) information. Memories can be extracted from long-term memory on their own or under the influence of stimuli on certain parts of the brain (for example, hypnosis).

The duration of information storage is affected by a person's attention to the latter. The more attention is focused, the longer the information will be stored.

Forgetting is also an integral part of memory. This process is necessary to unload the central nervous system from unnecessary memories.

Conclusion

Now I can answer my daughter's question:

1. Memory is a process of several separate components. To memorize information, you need to comprehend it, repeat it many times and periodically apply it in practice. This is due to certain properties of the brain and, accordingly, the existence of several types of memory.
2. It is important to know where the memory is stored in order to understand what the memorization of the rule depends on. It is found in the brain with a large number of neurons. To fix information in the cerebral cortex, it is necessary to create strong neural connections.
3. Knowing how memory works will help develop it, and enjoy this process.

This part of the consciousness is connected with the senses, so you can observe how the text is better remembered: when reading or by ear.

The process of memorization is also connected with the intellect: the more and better we learn, the easier memorization will be given later.

Successful memory is associated with mental state human: depressed mood can interfere with the process; the more positive emotions, interest a person shows in information, the more carefully he studies it, and the better he remembers it.

So it's important to have a positive attitude. For children, you can create conditions for the game to attract attention.

The need for development

The device of human memory suggests a relationship with intelligence. By developing it, we develop the intellect.

A person who devotes a lot of time to memorization and comprehension becomes more attentive and organized, he develops all kinds of thinking, imagination and Creative skills. In addition, such brain training prevents age-related diseases associated with memory impairment.

Depending on the goals of memorization training, there are three areas of use:

1. Household direction - necessary to eliminate forgetfulness at the household level (for example, periodically forgetting the phone at home).
2. Natural - when memory training is combined with a healthy lifestyle, and the results can be used in any field of human activity.
3. Artificial is the use of mnemonics, the development of which allows you to remember colossal amounts of various information.

It does not matter which method you choose, but if at least one of them is studied, then this will already be a step towards self-improvement and the opportunity to go further. These invaluable skills will undoubtedly come in handy in any area of ​​life, making you successful and happy.

- Every time you can't remember a name or a place, write it down in your diary.
“What if I can’t remember the diary?”

In this article, we will introduce you to the principles of memory, tell you about the methods of remembering and retrieving memories, share exercises, recommendations from scientists and unexpected facts about memory. You will definitely remember it 🙂

How memory works

Did you know that the very word "memory" misleads us. It gives the impression that we are talking about something unified, about one mental skill. But over the past fifty years, scientists have found that there are several different processes of remembering. For example, we have short-term and long-term memory.

Everyone knows that short term memory used when you need to hold a thought in your mind for about a minute (for example, the phone number you are going to call). At the same time, it is very important not to think about something else - otherwise you will immediately forget the number. This statement is true for both young and old people, but for the latter, its relevance is still slightly higher. Short-term memory is involved in various processes, for example, it serves to track changes in a number when adding or subtracting.

Long term memoryь is responsible for everything that we need in more than a minute, even if you were distracted by something else in this interval. Long-term memory is divided into procedural and declarative.

1. procedural memory concerns activities such as riding a bicycle or playing the piano. If once you have learned to do this, then your body will simply repeat the necessary movements - and this is controlled by procedural memory.
2. Declarative memory, in turn, participates in the conscious recall of information, for example, when you need to restore a shopping list. This type of memory can be either verbal (verbal) or visual (visual) and is divided into semantic and episodic memory.

• semantic memory refers to the meaning of concepts (in particular, to the names of people). Suppose that knowledge of what a bicycle is belongs to this kind of memory.
• episodic memory- to events. For example, knowing when you last went for a bike ride calls on your episodic memory. Part of episodic memory is autobiographical - it relates to various events and life experiences.

Finally we got to prospective memory- it refers to the things you are going to do: call the car service, or buy a bouquet of flowers and visit your aunt, or clean the cat's litter box.

How memories are formed and returned

Memory is the mechanism by which impressions received in the present affect us in the future. For the brain, new experience means spontaneous activity of neurons. When something happens to us, clusters of neurons fire up, passing on electrical impulses. The work of the gene and the production of protein create new synapses, stimulate the growth of new neurons.

But the process of forgetting is similar to how snow falls on objects, covering them with itself, from which they become white and white - so much so that you can no longer distinguish where it was.

An impulse that provokes the extraction of a memory - an internal (thought or feeling) or an external event, causes the brain to associate with an event from the past. works like a kind of predictive device: it is constantly preparing for the future based on the past. Memories condition our perception of the present through a "filter" through which we look and automatically assume what will happen next.

The memory extraction mechanism has an important property. It has only been carefully studied in the last twenty-five years: when we take a coded memory out of our internal storage, it is not necessarily recognized as something from the past.

Take, for example, cycling. You sit on a bike and just ride, and clusters of neurons fire in the brain, allowing you to pedal, balance and brake. This is one type of memory: an event in the past (trying to learn to ride a bike) influenced your behavior in the present (you ride it), but you don't feel today's bike ride as a memory of the day you first got to do it.

If you are asked to remember the very first ride on a bicycle, you will think, scan the memory storage, and, for example, you will have an image of a dad or an older sister who ran after you, you will remember the fear and pain from the first fall or the delight that you managed to get to the nearest turn. And you will know for sure that you are remembering something from the past.

The two types of memory processing are closely related in our Everyday life. Those that help us pedal are called implicit memories, and the ability to remember the day we learned to ride are called explicit memories.

Master to collect mosaics

We have a short-term working memory, a slate of consciousness, on which we can place a picture at any given moment. And, by the way, it has a limited capacity, where the images present in the foreground of consciousness are stored. But there are other types of memory.

In the left hemisphere, the hippocampus forms factual and linguistic knowledge; in the right - arranges the "bricks" of life history by time and topic. All this work makes the "search engine" of memory more efficient. The hippocampus can be compared to the one who collects mosaics: it connects separate fragments of images and sensations of implicit memories into full-fledged "pictures" of actual and autobiographical memory.

If suddenly the hippocampus is damaged, for example, during a stroke, memory will also be impaired. Daniel Siegel told this story in his book: “Once at a dinner with friends, I met a man with such a problem. He politely informed me that he had several bilateral hippocampal strokes, and asked me not to be offended if I went away for a second to pour myself water, and then he did not remember me. And indeed, I returned with a glass in my hands, and we again introduced ourselves to each other.

Like some sleeping pills, alcohol is notorious for temporarily shutting down our hippocampus. However, the state of blackout caused by alcohol is not the same as a temporary loss of consciousness: a person is conscious (although incapacitated), but does not encode what is happening in an explicit form. People who experience such memory lapses may not remember how they got home or how they met the person they woke up with in the morning in the same bed.

The hippocampus also shuts down in anger, and people suffering from fits of uncontrollable rage are not necessarily lying when they claim they don't remember what they said or did in this altered state of consciousness.

How to test your memory

Psychologists use different techniques to test memory. Some of them you can do yourself at home.

1. Verbal memory test. Have someone read 15 words to you (only unrelated words: bush, bird, hat, etc.). Repeat them: people under 45 usually remember about 7-9 words. Then listen to this list four more times. Norm: reproduce 12–15 words. Go about your business and after 15 minutes repeat the words (but only from memory). Most middle-aged people cannot reproduce more than 10 words.
2. Visual memory test. Draw this complex diagram, and after 20 try to draw it from memory. The more details you remember, the better your memory is developed.

How is memory related to the senses?

According to scientist Michael Merzenich, “one of the most important findings from recent research is that the senses (hearing, sight, and others) are closely related to memory and cognitive abilities. Because of this interdependence, the weakness of one often means, or even causes, the weakness of the other.

For example, Alzheimer's patients are known to gradually lose their memory. And one of the manifestations of this disease is that they begin to eat less. It turned out that, since visual impairment is among the symptoms of this disease, patients (among other reasons) simply do not see food ...

Another example concerns normal age-related changes cognitive activity. Aging, a person becomes more and more forgetful and absent-minded. This is largely due to the fact that the brain is no longer as good as before, processing sensory signals. As a result, we lose the ability to retain new visualizations of our experience as clearly as before, and subsequently we have problems using and recovering them.

By the way, it is curious that exposure to blue light enhances the response to emotional stimuli of the hypothalamus and amygdala, that is, the brain regions responsible for organizing attention and memory. So looking at all shades of blue is useful.

Techniques and exercises for training memory

The first and most important thing you need to know in order to have a good memory is. Studies have shown that the hippocampus responsible for spatial memory is enlarged in taxi drivers. This means that the more often you do activities that use memory, the better you pump it.

And here are some more tricks that will help you develop your memory, improve your ability to remember and remember everything you need.

1. Go crazy!

human memory extremely economical. If it retained all the irritating factors and all the information, all the daily little things, then most likely the brain would explode or, due to excessive exposure to stimuli, we would become incapacitated.

The brain differentiates and selects new information in order to be able to work more efficiently. And this choice the brain of each person makes individually. Memory retains only those things to which we attach special importance and which we consciously and emotionally process. Thus, feelings play a significant role in the process of storing information in memory.. The so-called limbic system is responsible for this, which, according to the structure of the brain, is located directly under the cerebral cortex. The limbic system, the center of the senses and the brain, also includes the “new detector” hippocampus, which evaluates incoming information from an emotional point of view. No new information relating to any facts or biographical memories enters long-term memory without passing through the limbic system, which serves as a filter, looking for only the necessary information, associates it with feelings, and then distributes it to the cerebral cortex. The more often this process occurs, the stronger it is emotionally colored, the faster this information will be learned and the longer it will be stored in memory.

The novelty, meaning, and intensity of emotional coloring are decisive factors in what we retain in our memory. Strong emotional events are processed differently than minor ones, extraneous facts are perceived worse than personal experience. Neutral information, such as ordinary school material, must be processed consciously, repeated, transformed, supplemented and simply memorized. The principle applies First in last out“, meaning: what a person learned first is remembered best. Fresh information only after a conscious explanation can be stored for a long time in memory.

Thus, the expression "to transfer knowledge" is erroneous. Knowledge cannot be fully transferred, but must be built into the memory of each person through his own system of nerve connections. Goethe said a wonderful phrase: "You need to get your knowledge in order to possess it!".

Just because our brain is very economical and has many filters, however, does not mean that our large storage, our long-term memory, can ever be full. The cerebral cortex has an incomprehensibly large amount of memory. And the more we saturate it, the faster and better our brain can think and remember new information.

The mystery of human memory is one of the main scientific problems of the 21st century, and it will have to be solved by the joint efforts of chemists, physicists, biologists, physiologists, mathematicians and representatives of other scientific disciplines. And although we are still far from fully understanding what happens to us when we “remember”, “forget” and “remember again”, important discoveries of recent years point the right way.

One of the main problems of neurophysiology is the inability to conduct experiments on humans. However, even in primitive animals, the basic mechanisms of memory are similar to ours.

Pavel Balaban

Today, even the answer to the basic question - what is memory in time and space - can consist mainly of hypotheses and assumptions. If we talk about space, it is still not very clear how memory is organized and where exactly in the brain it is located. These sciences suggest that its elements are present everywhere, in each of the areas of our "gray matter". Moreover, seemingly the same information can be recorded in memory in different places.

For example, it has been found that spatial memory (when we remember a certain environment for the first time - a room, a street, a landscape) is associated with a region of the brain called the hippocampus. When we try to get this situation out of memory, say, ten years later, this memory will already be extracted from a completely different area. Yes, memory can move within the brain, and this thesis is best illustrated by an experiment once conducted with chickens. In the life of newly hatched chicks, imprinting plays a big role - instantaneous learning (and placement in memory is learning). For example, a chicken sees a large moving object and immediately “imprints” in the brain: this is a chicken mother, you need to follow her. But if, after five days, the part of the brain responsible for imprinting is removed from the chicken, it turns out that ... the memorized skill has not gone away. He moved to another area, and this proves that there is one repository for immediate learning outcomes, and another for long-term storage.

We remember with pleasure

But it is even more surprising that there is no such clear sequence of moving memory from operational to permanent, as it happens in a computer, in the brain. Working memory, fixing immediate sensations, simultaneously triggers other memory mechanisms - medium-term and long-term. But the brain is an energy-intensive system and therefore tries to optimize the expenditure of its resources, including memory. Therefore, nature has created a multi-stage system. Working memory is quickly formed and just as quickly destroyed - there is a special mechanism for this. But for real important events are recorded for long-term storage, their importance is emphasized by emotion, attitude to information. At the level of physiology, emotion is the activation of the most powerful biochemical modulating systems. These systems release hormones-mediators that change the biochemistry of memory in the right direction. Among them, for example, are various hormones of pleasure, the names of which remind not so much of neurophysiology as of the criminal chronicle: these are morphines, opioids, cannabinoids - that is, narcotic substances produced by our body. In particular, endocannabinoids are generated directly at synapses, the junctions of nerve cells. They affect the effectiveness of these contacts and thus "encourage" the recording of this or that information in memory. Other substances from the number of mediator hormones can, on the contrary, suppress the process of moving data from working memory to long-term memory.

The mechanisms of emotional, that is, biochemical reinforcement of memory, are now being actively studied. The only problem is that laboratory research of this kind can only be carried out on animals, but how much can a laboratory rat tell us about its emotions?

If we have stored something in memory, then sometimes the time comes to remember this information, that is, to extract it from memory. But is the word "extract" correct? Apparently, not much. It seems that memory mechanisms do not extract information, but re-generate it. There is no information in these mechanisms, just as there is no voice or music in the hardware of a radio receiver. But everything is clear with the receiver - it processes and converts the electromagnetic signal received by the antenna. What kind of “signal” is processed when the memory is retrieved, where and how this data is stored, is still very difficult to say. However, it is already known that when remembering, the memory is rewritten, modified, or at least this happens with some types of memory.

Not electricity, but chemistry

In search of an answer to the question of how memory can be modified or even erased, in last years important discoveries were made and whole line works devoted to the "memory molecule".

In fact, they have been trying to isolate such a molecule, or at least some material carrier of thought and memory, for two hundred years, but without much success. In the end, neurophysiologists came to the conclusion that there is nothing specific to memory in the brain: there are 100 billion neurons, there are 10 quadrillions of connections between them, and somewhere, in this cosmic scale, memory, thoughts, and behavior are uniformly encoded. Attempts were made to block certain chemicals in the brain, and this led to a change in memory, but also to a change in the entire functioning of the body. It was only in 2006 that the first works appeared on the biochemical system, which seems to be very specific to memory. Her blockade did not cause any changes in either behavior or learning ability - only the loss of part of the memory. For example, memory about the situation if the blocker was introduced into the hippocampus. Or about emotional shock if the blocker was injected into the amygdala. The biochemical system discovered is a protein, an enzyme called protein kinase M-zeta, which controls other proteins.

One of the main problems of neurophysiology is the inability to conduct experiments on humans. However, even in primitive animals, the basic mechanisms of memory are similar to ours.

The molecule works at the site of synaptic contact - the contact between brain neurons. Here it is necessary to make one important digression and explain the specifics of these same contacts. The brain is often likened to a computer, and therefore many people think that the connections between neurons, which create everything that we call thinking and memory, are purely electrical in nature. But it's not. The language of synapses is chemistry, here some released molecules, like a key with a lock, interact with other molecules (receptors), and only then do electrical processes begin. How many specific receptors will be delivered through the nerve cell to the place of contact depends on the efficiency, the greater throughput of the synapse.

Protein with special properties

Protein kinase M-zeta just controls the delivery of receptors through the synapse and thus increases its effectiveness. When these molecules fire simultaneously at tens of thousands of synapses, signals are rerouted, and general properties some network of neurons change. All this tells us little about how memory changes are encoded in this rerouting, but one thing is known for sure: if the protein kinase M-zeta is blocked, the memory will be erased, because those chemical bonds who provide it will not work. The newly discovered "molecule" of memory has a number of interesting features.

First, it is capable of self-reproduction. If, as a result of learning (that is, obtaining new information), a certain additive was formed in the synapse in the form of a certain amount of protein kinase M-zeta, then this amount can remain there for a very long time, despite the fact that this protein molecule decomposes in three to four days. In some way, the molecule mobilizes the resources of the cell and ensures the synthesis and delivery of new molecules to the place of synaptic contact to replace those that have left.

Secondly, to most interesting features protein kinase M-zeta includes its blocking. When the researchers needed to obtain a substance for experiments on blocking the "molecule" of memory, they simply "read" the section of her gene, in which her own peptide blocker is encoded, and synthesized it. However, this blocker is never produced by the cell itself, and for what purpose evolution left its code in the genome is unclear.

The third important feature of the molecule is that both it and its blocker have an almost identical appearance for all living beings with a nervous system. This indicates that, in the form of protein kinase M-zeta, we are dealing with the most ancient adaptive mechanism, on which human memory is also built.

Of course, the protein kinase M-zeta is not a "memory molecule" in the sense in which the scientists of the past hoped to find it. It is not a material carrier of memorized information, but, obviously, it acts as a key regulator of the effectiveness of connections within the brain, it initiates the emergence of new configurations as a result of learning.

Get into contact

Now experiments with the protein kinase blocker M-zeta are, in a sense, "shooting on the squares." The substance is injected into certain areas of the brain of experimental animals with a very thin needle and thus turns off the memory immediately in large functional blocks. The boundaries of penetration of the blocker are not always clear, as well as its concentration in the area of ​​the site chosen as the target. As a result, not all experiments in this area bring unambiguous results.

A true understanding of the processes occurring in memory can be obtained by working at the level of individual synapses, but this requires targeted delivery of the blocker to the contact between neurons. Today it is impossible, but since such a task is facing science, sooner or later the tools to solve it will appear. Special hopes are placed on optogenetics. It has been established that a cell in which the possibility of synthesizing a light-sensitive protein is built in by genetic engineering methods can be controlled using a laser beam. And if such manipulations at the level of living organisms are not yet performed, something similar is already being done on the basis of grown cell cultures, and the results are very impressive.