Suffering from Memory Loss...But Maybe not for Long.

      From being able to recall that you need to do laundry to remembering your 6th birthday party, memory is one of the most essential tools that is constantly being utilized by humans and animals alike throughout our daily life. Memory is best defined as the process and ability to obtain, encode, store, and retrieve information. While it isn't always obvious to us, we use memory all the time, and is a vital part of our survival and daily life. Additionally, there is more than one type of memory, some common types of memory include short-term memory, long-term memory, and sensory memory.

    Stephanie Grella has recently published an article that examines contextual memory. This type of memory refers to the context surrounding a particular experience or event, beyond the physical location or spatial information at the location. Contextual memory includes things such as emotions and various other circumstances or relevant information encompassing the experience. Dr. Grella makes a point in her article to explore the relevancy of different parts of the brain such as the hippocampus and the locus coeruleus (LC) and their ties to Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease is usually associated with it's most commonly known symptom, dementia and memory loss. 

    Alzheimer's disease and dementia is known to affect the senior populations, however, more research regarding a different type of memory loss has recently been published. Infantile amnesia is a growing research field, which is dedicated to studying the loss of memory in infants. An article published in Science discusses how new research with rodents discovered that memories we believe we have lost, may not actually be lost, instead forgotten. Additionally, there has been more recent studies with human participants, and there is hope to even ttry to reverse engineer early memory formation in order to figure out how to reactivate these memories. This is still a rapidly emerging field of research, but it might be possible to someday recall memories that we once thought were lost forever.

Sources:

1.) https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-memory-2795006

2.) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnmol.2024.1342622/full

3.) https://www.science.org/content/article/are-your-earliest-childhood-memories-still-lurking-your-mind-or-gone-forever