Memory for faces and serotonin.

How do we distinguish a familiar face from an unfamiliar one? Well, there is nothing surprising in this — you will say and you will be right — it will not be difficult for us to make this differentiation — a face that is familiar to us is already stored in our memory, but an unfamiliar face is not there, because we haven’t met him yet. What else can be said on this topic? Is it possible to ask the question: how do we even capture, preserve and reproduce people’s faces in memory? Let’s talk about this.

I think many people know about the existence of several functional memory centers in our brain. But, of course, the hippocampus is most often heard. And precisely social memory is his domain. Here it is worth paying attention to the fact that social memory is closely related to social interaction: if there is no interaction with the subject, there is no work of the center to remember it. It turns out that in order to capture the face of a certain person in memory, it is not always enough for us to just see him, we also have to communicate with him.

Many readers who are already familiar with my articles have probably already guessed that now I will move on to… mice, or rather, to experiments with these wonderful rodents, thanks to which neuroscience has been enriched with new knowledge. So, neuroscientists from Stanford conducted research with mice, which, by the way, are very sociable creatures! Have you seen two mice who, when they meet, begin to intensively sniff and feel each other with the help of whiskers, often forgetting…