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A walnut-sized area of the brain known as the amygdala plays a giant role in determining which experiences end up in long-term memory and which are forgotten. The Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University discovery points to the amygdala as a potential target for treating memory disorders.

The amygdala, located deep below the brain's surface in the temporal lobe, is classically associated with emotional and social behavior. In memory, its role was thought to be limited to learning and recalling experiences that evoked fear or other strong feelings.

But the new study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, uncovered a much broader role for the amygdala in forming long-lasting memories in general.

In effect, the amygdala acts as a filter, tagging a small subset of ongoing experiences that end up being stored in long-term memory and are thereby available for later retrieval.

"Our results demonstrate that the activity of specific kinds of neurons in the amygdala predicts, while the person sees an image for the first time, whether that image will later be remembered," said Ueli Rutishauser, director of the Center for Neural Science and Medicine at Cedars-Sinai and the study's corresponding author.

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