In a new study, scientists took 14 people with epilepsy and tracked their brain activity with electrodes. While playing a memory game, ripples formed in two areas of the brain, the medial temporal lobe and the temporal association cortex, when they were asked to recall something. These ripples traveled “at a rate of around 100 per second” and were similar to the brain activity when the memory was first formed. When you recall a memory, “you mentally jump back in time and re-experience it” according to a researcher. Scientists are not sure if the waves carry the information of the memory or are just a reaction of something else. These brain waves could possibly be the main part of a person's ability to remember.
Link: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ripples-brain-memories-recall
Do you think the waves are carrying the memory or are they just a reacting to something else?
My assumption would be that they are a reaction, connecting to something else, but also carrying the given information along.
Why would they test people who have epilepsy?
I don’t understand why they are specifically testing people who have epilepsy and not people who have normal brain functions; maybe they weren’t originally testing the recall of a memory.
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They may be delivering information to a part of a brain. They could also be a trigger for memories to start playing back when people want to remember them. Scientists may have tested people with epilepsy to see how their brains functioned.
I am wondering why they didn't have this test before or did they just realize that the machine might pick up a brain wave when recalling a memory. I think it is just a reaction to something.
I think it could hurt they memory, because of how much your doing it at a time. And I think that if you keep repeating what you've already seen or did it could make you forget about it.
I think it's cause its rare in most people and most people are born with it.
I don't know about hurting your memory per se but, hey, you never know. Most of the time when you repeat something you've seen or heard it helps with memory but hearing a word too much can cause something (I can't remember the name).
The only explanation I can think of for them experimenting on those with epilepsy is that maybe the waves in their brains would be stronger. Epilepsy is a condition where you get seizures, so I would think that their brain waves would be stronger and therefore easier to evaluate.
I think that could be a possibility, but I don't know why their brain waves would be stronger. I just think they volunteered to be tested because they were used to their brain being tracked.
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