A Surprisingly Odd Fact About Dying Brain Cells

Dying brain cells are an everyday occurrence. In fact, dying cells are common all over the body. Yet, what is it about brain cells that particularly interests us in this article today? Well, it was a curious question asked by someone that triggered this venture. The question was, “If my brain cells die every day, won’t the memory stored by my brain cells go away with them? How is my memory still intact?” It was a seemingly innocent, yet valid thread of questions. I thought I’d explore the answers to these questions in the form of a short essay.

How is Memory Stored in The Brain?

Without going into the nitty gritty science, let’s just touch upon the basics required to answer our questions. As opposed to the understanding of the person who asked the questions originally, memory that we’ve accumulated over the years is not stored within the cells. Let’s say that memory is stored (in part) as particular patterns of cells in the brain. It is the pattern that interests us, and not the contents of the cell in the context of memories.

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What Happens When Brain Cells Die?

All cells in the human body typically have a life span, and die out either after their span runs out or if they are damaged due to external factors. But due to various biological mechanisms including the genetic code, new and identical cells are produced to replace the dying cells. Of course, the new cells are not perfect replicas. They carry a certain amount of error in replication that can normally be ignored. But this error accumulates over a period of time, and causes the physical deviations we know as ageing. So, in short, when brain cells die, they are replaced.

How Does Replacing Cells Help Retain Memory?

When a brain cell replaces another dead brain cell, what it is essentially helping us achieve is to sustain the original pattern of arrangement of the entire group of cells. This in turn enables us to retain our memories without any issues. As an analogy, consider a computer keyboard. At first, we have a keyboard. Let’s say that at some point the enter key breaks due to over usage. Now we have a keyboard with a broken key (this broken key represents analogically a brain cell). If we get a new enter key and replace the broken enter key, we haven’t altered the fact that it is a keyboard. In fact, we have a fully functional keyboard once again. The enter key by itself does not represent the keyboard. But together as a set of keys, all the keys together represent the keyboard.

When Do Dying Brain Cells Affect Memory?

What we’ve looked at so far is the natural process of cell regeneration, and this doesn’t affect the memory (other than error accumulation that leads to ageing). But when brain cells are ‘killed’, that is, die due to an unnatural process, this may very well lead to loss / alteration of memory schema. People who suffer memory losses due to head injuries are an example of this. Other forms of external damage may be caused by disease causing infections, or even by malfunction of the body’s own systems like in the case of cancer.

The Marvel That is The Human System

By and large, each and every system of the human body is remarkably complex, and it is a marvel how all of these systems function as a single unit. The memory system is by no means an exception. How we are able to retain memories via such complex, calculated clock-work-like mechanisms amazes me every time I take time to ponder upon how delicate, intricate and yet, how robust these systems are. Such biological systems are also by far the most complex engineering mechanisms that I’ve ever come across. Such is the marvel of the human body.

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Further reading that might interest you: Can We Really Solve the Ageing Challenge? and How to Tame Running Injuries