Restoring partial memories may be possible, but it would face many technical challenges, says Don Arnold, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California.
When people die, they often leave behind personal belongings, but what happens to their entire life experiences? Can scientists extract and recover memories from their brains? According to Don Arnold, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, recovering some memories may be possible, but it would be technically challenging.
With today's technology, memory retrieval might work like this: First, identify the group of brain cells, or neurons, that encode a particular memory in the brain and understand how they're connected. Then, activate those neurons to create an artificial neural network—a machine learning algorithm that simulates how the brain works—that approximates it.
Memories are encoded by groups of neurons, Arnold says. Short-term and long-term memories are formed in the hippocampus. Other parts of the brain store different aspects of a memory, such as emotions or other sensory details, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Groups of neurons associated with a single memory leave a physical trace in the brain called an engram.
Neuroscientists have identified engrams in the hippocampus of mice. For example, in a 2012 study in the journal Nature, the authors found that certain brain cells were associated with memories of a fearful experience.
If scientists had a complete model of the human brain in the future, they could theoretically pinpoint the location of the memory they wanted to retrieve, Arnold said. But memories can be complex, especially long-term memories tied to places, relationships, or skills. Retrieving memories from the dead is even more complicated because aspects of a memory are scattered throughout the brain. For example, sensory details may be stored in the parietal lobe and sensory cortex.
Neurons in an engram are connected through synapses — gaps between neurons through which electrochemical signals pass, according to the US National Library of Medicine. When activated, a memory triggers a chain of synapses between these groups, which can be stored in different brain regions.
Initially, neurons that are active during the original event create an engram. But over time, there is evidence that memories move to different locations as they consolidate in the brain, Arnold says.
Cutting out the cells that make up an engram is not a good way to retrieve a memory. An engram is not really a memory, it is just a storage location. So even if you find an engram, it is very difficult to recreate the original event as the memory owner experienced it.
“Memory is very reconstructive, meaning you remember pieces of an event, but you don’t really have the whole thing,” says Charan Ranganath, director of the Memory and Resilience program at the University of California, Davis.
It's an efficient way to create memories, because the brain can use what it already knows to fill in the gaps, rather than having to create a new "memory" for every part of the experience. For example, a person might remember eating chocolate cake and playing tag at their 5th birthday party. They don't remember other details like who was there or whether it was raining. However, they still have an overall memory of the experience.
The best neural network model would require scanning a person’s brain to recall events over and over again throughout their life, Ranganath says. Then, perhaps, a neural network could be used to recreate a specific memory after the person dies. But that assumes that memories are static, like a file on a hard drive that replays a sequence of events. Instead, memories are dynamic.
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