Many goals motivate scientific interest in human memory. The brain's ability to create, store, and access memories helps enable vision, speech, learning, thought, and identity; understanding memory elucidates both the functions of remembering and the functions that rely on them. Injury and illness can suppress or overstimulate memory function, with extreme cases causing ailments like Alzheimer's disease and dementia on the one hand and PTSD and addiction on the other; a theory explaining how biological mechanisms create memory phenomena may help pinpoint the mechanistic changes responsible for memory failures. This project outlines a path to a fundamentally new theory for how the microscopic behavior of individual neurons generates the macroscopic phenomena of memory performance. The potential outcomes of this project can shed greater light on the understanding of human memory and the processes that influence it.
This project seeks to create models for brain behavior and memory phenomena and applies mathematical tools to investigate whether the brain model can generate those memory phenomena. Brain behavior is structured here as a Markov process derived from models of individual neurons, their connectivity, and stimuli. Markov processes, which capture the assumption that the past affects the future only through its effects on the present, exhibit a characteristic behavior called stochastic convergence, where the Markov process trends toward a predictable steady-state behavior over time. The memory model seeks to capture memory retrieval, formation, and storage as phenomena where the brain state converges to desired outcomes under corresponding stimuli, creates new convergence relationships through neuronal plasticity, and protects old convergence relationships from damage caused by that same plasticity.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
