It’s not you, it’s your brain forgets things on purpose to save energy – Political Animal

Image of a brain scan. / Fotolia

The brain has mechanisms to forget the unnecessary information, a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), led by scientists at the University of Lund (Sweden), which has participated Riccardo Zucca, a researcher at the Research Group Emotive and Cognitive perceptual systems and the Centre for Neuro-Robotics and Autonomous Systems Technology Department Information and Communication at the University Pompeu Fabra.

The brain is able to assimilate a new stimulus, but later rejected if they are similar in the time that it recognizes. So the paradox that “two stimuli produce worse results than one, but what is really happening is that the brain active neural mechanisms to avoid the energy expense of learning” is given, the authors suggested.

The neuronal activity in charge of storing information is an additional energy expenditure, so the brain forgets intentionally

The charge of neuronal activity memorize information is an additional energy expenditure, so the brain forgets intentionally, even temporarily, to save energy. When the brain has learned a particular association brake mechanism is activated learning.

In the article published in PNAS the experiment described the scientists designed to draw conclusions study. An audible tone or light signal and a blast of air that caused the blink of an eye: In the first phase, two stimuli the animal experimental model for the brain’s associate applied. Next, he was the subject blinked an eye on the time listening to the tone or light signal, even without air blast again.

Finally, to reapply the acoustic tone or light signal together with the rush of air, the association between stimuli became confused.

“The findings may explain why a stronger partnership leads to a value less reinforcement, “he says Zucca

As Zucca says,” the study’s findings may explain why a stronger partnership leads to a value of less reinforcement, in the context of behavioral conditioning unexperimento “.

Although it had been described earlier in the Rescorla-Wagner model, a model that has guided research in behavioral science and neuroscience for decades, this phenomenon did not yet have a physiological explanation.

Scientists here have studied Purkinje cells from the cortex of the cerebellum of ferrets and found that the responses of Purkinje cells, Triggers conditioned adaptive flicker temporarily suppress the stimulus not gradually conditioned, providing for first physiological evidence of the phenomenon described in Rescorla-Wagner model.