Neuroscientists are learning a lot about how the human brain works by looking at other rapidly developing fields, like neural networks and artificial intelligence more broadly.
A recent paper published in Nature Neuroscience posits, for instance, that the brain's dual, linked learning systems, orchestrated by the hippocampus and the neocortex, may determine how to save and store new information based on its potential future utility.
The general framework for thinking about how memories are formed (according to this theory anyway), is that the hippocampus rapidly encodes new information we take in, before the neocortex slowly, over time, incorporates some of that information into our longer-term neural storage.
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