Predicting not to predict too much: How the memory machinery in our brain anticipates the uncertain future

Yadin Dudai

Department of Neurobiology

Weizmann Institute of Science

Rehovot, Israel

The faculty of memory in our brain holds information about the past to permit adaptive responses to ongoing and forthcoming events. Memory is hence oriented toward the present and the future rather than toward the past. This inherent attribute is reflected in the operation of certain elementary building blocks of the memory systems in out brain.

Recent findings cast new light on how combinations of plasticity and metaplasticity (i.e. the plasticity of neural plasticity) permit the brain to balance over time between stability and malleability of the information stored.

Furthermore, this delicate balance may contribute to the most precious of human cognitive faculties, imagination, which endows the human species with an immense phylogenetic advantage.