How your brain remembers Memory The injured brain The Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives The Whole Brain Atlas Neuroscience Virtual Library On the Brain According to Dr. Barry Gordon in his book, Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Everyday Life, as information enters your brain, it is the type of information you are receiving that determines which region of your brain is active. For example, words are initially processed in the language regions of the brain, while pictures are processed initially in the visual regions. When information comes into a region of the brain, it comes in as a pattern of nerve cell activity. This nerve cell activity normally persists for just a short period of time -— seconds or less. If the information in this temporary pattern of activity is to be permanently stored -— and most is not -— it will be saved within the same regions of the brain. The saved patterns of activity can be called forth again, at some later time. To do this, some nerve cell connections are strengthened, while others may be weakened. These changes are relatively permanent, although some changes may take weeks or months to completely solidify. Even though the solidification occurs in the regions of the brain that contained the original activity, the signal to make the solidification occur came from other regions. The best known of these regions with such signaling functions are the hippocampus and the thalamus. The hippocampus is on the inner side of the temporal lobe; the thalamus is located deep within the center of the brain.