How the Brain Decides What to Remember

György Buzsáki first started tinkering with waves when he was in high school.

As a child, he tuned in to radio waves to talk to strangers from the Faroe Islands to Jordan .

Now, as a professor of neuroscience, he tunes in to brain waves to study how electrical activity from neurons consolidates and stores long-term memories.

The sharp wave ripples replay brain activity from an animal’s experience, such as running through a maze.

The replay ripples oscillated 10 to 20 times faster than the original signals.

When researchers suppressed or disrupted the ripples, rats performed worse on memory tasks.

Later studies showed elongating or creating more ripples improved rats’ memory.

Researchers from NYU found sharp wave ripples that fired when rats were awake and asleep seemed to tag experiences for memory.

The NYU team’s key innovation was to bring the element of time, which distinguishes similar memories from one another, into their analysis.

The research leaves a burning question unanswered: Why is one experience chosen over another? It's not clear why a mouse would remember one trial better than another.