Unlocking brain’s power to store, recall events

Nagpur: When a person travels on the same route every day, he tends to remember it very well with each landmark. But when you are travelling a long route once in a while, the brain still allows you to remember it. Even if you have lost way, the brain allows you to know where you are and then proceed accordingly.

This is made possible by a part of the brain called as ‘Hippocampus’, which is responsible for storing the episodic memories. That is the reason why one can remember both pleasant and harsh memories of childhood until death. In fact, last year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine went to two scientists, John Okeefe and May-Britt Moser, for their discovery of cells that constitute a positioning system in brain. They worked on finding out how does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment.

Sachin Deshmukh, neuroscientist at the Centre for Neurosciences in Indian Institute of Science at Bengaluru, is also working on similar lines. “Hippocampus, located in the front lobe of the brain, allows us to have long lasting memories from a single event or conversation by deriving information from a confluence of things and ‘what, when and where’ of the event or conversation. I am trying to find out how the brain puts the information together and prepares a spatial map,” he told TOI.

Deshmukh was in the city to deliver the annual Late Professor VG Bhide memorial lecture on ‘Thought, memory, action: how does brain do it all’ at applied physics department of the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT).

Deshmukh, who has joined IISC Bengaluru just in October last year, has been working on the subject since his PhD work in National Centre for Biological Sciences at Bengaluru. He pursued it further with Professor James Knierim at Houston and later at the Mind Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University till returning to India.

“There are two kinds of subjects involved in memory when you are travelling — Where you are and where you think you are. The Hippocampus has cells called as ‘place cells’ which allow us to distinguish between the two and guide us,” said Deshmukh.

Talking about the ongoing research in neurosciences, Deshmukh said man knows the basic functions of various parts of brain but is yet to discover the actual manner of their functioning. In fact, scientists are working on the actual function of each neurone (brain cell) and find out the pattern of gene expression of each of these neurons. This will help in treating various brain diseases. “What can turn on and off each of the neurons is being studied,” he said.