When facing new situations or problems, humans typically rely on knowledge they acquired in the past. Specifically, neuroscience studies suggest that the brain reorganizes past experiences and previously acquired knowledge, creating mental frameworks that can help humans to solve the problems they are facing. The recombination of past knowledge into new mental structures also allows humans to flexibly plan future actions in changing environments. Past studies suggest that two key brain regions contribute to this process, the hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).
The hippocampus is a brain structure that plays a key role in the formation of memories and spatial navigation. The mPFC, on the other hand, is known to support decision-making, planning, reasoning and the integration of information.
Researchers at Beijing Normal University, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, University College London (UCL) and other institutes recently set out to investigate how the hippocampus and mPFC work together to combine past knowledge into new configurations. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that this process is supported by brief bursts of high-frequency neural activity in the hippocampus, called hippocampal ripples, and the replay (i.e., re-activation) of past experiences in the brain.
