Psychologists have known for many years that memories are primarily stored in the cerebral cortex of the brain, and that a ‘control centre’ buried deep in the brain, is involved in both creating memories and retrieving them from their store in the cerebral cortex: made up of the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex.

In November 2014 a team led by researchers from Germany’s Magdeburg University and the German Centre for Neurogenerative Disease used a highly sensitive form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), called ‘7 Tesla ultra-high-field MRI’, to pinpoint the precise regions involved in processing memories. By studying the brain’s activity in very precise detail, the researchers could see that memories were created in particular neuronal layers within the hippocampus, and the information then travelled from the hippocampus out to the cerebral cortex.

The research team believe their results have identified the location of the ‘gateway’ or ‘doorway’ to memories. Next they want to see if it is damage to this gateway region that is the cause of memory loss in dementia, or whether memories remain intact at this point for dementia sufferers, with problems then occurring at later stages in memory processing and storage.