Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany.
Brain Struct Funct. 2018 Apr;223(3):1379-1389. doi: 10.1007/s00429-017-1556-2. Epub 2017 Nov 14.
Participants of the annual World Memory Championships regularly demonstrate extraordinary memory feats, such as memorising the order of 52 playing cards in 20 s or 1000 binary digits in 5 min. On a cognitive level, memory athletes use well-known mnemonic strategies, such as the method of loci. However, whether these feats are enabled solely through the use of mnemonic strategies or whether they benefit additionally from optimised neural circuits is still not fully clarified. Investigating 23 leading memory athletes, we found volumes of their right hippocampus and caudate nucleus were stronger correlated with each other compared to matched controls; both these volumes positively correlated with their position in the memory sports world ranking. Furthermore, we observed larger volumes of the right anterior hippocampus in athletes. Complementing these structural findings, on a functional level, fMRI resting state connectivity of the anterior hippocampus to both the posterior hippocampus and caudate nucleus predicted the athletes rank. While a competitive interaction between hippocampus and caudate nucleus is often observed in normal memory function, our findings suggest that a hippocampal-caudate nucleus cooperation may enable exceptional memory performance. We speculate that this cooperation reflects an integration of the two memory systems at issue-enabling optimal combination of stimulus-response learning and map-based learning when using mnemonic strategies as for example the method of loci.
参与者的年度世界记忆锦标赛经常表现出非凡的记忆壮举，如在 20 秒内记住 52 张扑克牌的顺序或在 5 分钟内记住 1000 个二进制数字。在认知层面上，记忆运动员使用众所周知的记忆策略，如位置记忆法。然而，这些壮举是否仅仅通过使用记忆策略来实现，或者它们是否还受益于优化的神经回路，仍然没有完全阐明。我们调查了 23 名顶尖的记忆运动员，发现他们右侧海马体和尾状核的体积彼此之间的相关性比匹配的对照组更强；这两个体积都与他们在记忆运动世界排名中的位置呈正相关。此外，我们观察到运动员右侧前海马体的体积更大。补充这些结构发现，在功能水平上，前海马体与后海马体和尾状核的 fMRI 静息状态连接预测了运动员的排名。虽然在正常记忆功能中经常观察到海马体和尾状核之间的竞争相互作用，但我们的发现表明，海马体-尾状核的合作可能使记忆表现异常。我们推测这种合作反映了两个正在研究的记忆系统的整合——当使用记忆策略（例如位置记忆法）时，能够最佳地结合刺激-反应学习和基于地图的学习。
