Separate Neurons for Content and Context Enable Flexible Human Memory

How neuron groups team up to embed memories in context

Humans have the remarkable ability to remember the same person or object in completely different situations. We can easily distinguish between dinner with a friend and a business meeting with the same friend. "We already know that deep in the memory centers of the brain, specific cells, called concept neurons, respond to this friend, regardless of the environment in which he appears," says Prof. Florian Mormann from the Clinic for Epileptology a…

Separate neurons for content and context enable flexible human memory

The human brain must be able to link memory content to the circumstances in which it occurs. Researchers in Bonn have now discovered how the human brain uses two different groups of neurons to store content and context separately.

Distinct neuronal populations in the human brain combine content and context

The medial temporal lobe, and particularly the hippocampus, has been proposed to encode items in context1,2. Although hippocampal memory representations are largely context-dependent in rodents3,4, concept cells in humans appear to be context-invariant5. However, it remains unknown how item and context information are combined to form or retrieve integrated item-in-context memories at the single-neuron level in humans. Here we show that coordina…