How do you recognize a long-lost friend?

August 19, 2015

 

You spot a familiar face on the street and rack your brain over where you might have seen him. And then it dawns on you. That is an old high school friend you haven't seen in years.

But how does the brain manage to make this connection from a crowd of strangers walking past?

An international team led by Johns Hopkins University researchers found there is a part of the hippocampus dedicated to creating and processing this type of memory. The work, published Wednesday in the journal Neuron, could help researchers better understand how the mind works and better understand diseases like Alzheimer's...

Christine Ann Denny, PhD, a neuroscientist at Columbia University Medical Center who did not take part in the study, said the findings "are extremely important because they highlight the need to study the heterogeneity of brain regions rather than to study brain regions as static, homogenous units."