By testing participants with electrodes implanted in their brain, Dr. Kahana’s team precisely mapped brain activity during successful memory encoding. Their research identified a network of critical brain regions that show increased high-frequency activity (HFA) during memory encoding. Crucially, they revealed that memory encoding involves two distinct phases of HFA increases: an early phase in visual and medial temporal areas, followed by a later phase in frontal and parietal regions (Burke et al., 2014). This work provided a detailed spatio-temporal understanding of the neural processes underlying human memory formation. With this new understanding of the brain’s memory network, Dr. Kahana’s team explored not just where in the brain memory resides, but how to directly stimulate these areas to correct lapses in memory.
