ReviewThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2021
The Architecture of Human Memory: Insights from Human Single-Neuron Recordings.
Review in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers.
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Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed, 92 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mental Scene and Memory Construction and the Hippocampus.Hippocampus · 2026Article
- Concept Cells and the Neural Bases of Human Memory.Acta physiologica (Oxford, England) · 2026Review
- Downregulation of UQCRC1 Expression Leads to Cognitive Decline by Disrupting the Cilia in the Dentate Gyrus.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Large-scale single-neuron recording in the human cortex using an ultra-flexible electrode array.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Learning of visual sequences by neurons in the human hippocampus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Neural representations of visual memory in inferotemporal cortex reveal a generalizable framework for translating between spikes and field potentials.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Characterization of the spatiotemporal representations of visual, semantic, and memorability features in the human brain.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Single-Neuron Recordings Research in Children: Ethical Considerations, Feasibility, Technical Aspects, and Scientific Opportunities.Pediatric neurosurgery · 2026Review
- Brain-wide single-neuron bases of working memory for sounds in humans.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Beta bursts mediate amygdala gating of hippocampal emotional encoding.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Theta-phase locking of single neurons during human spatial memory.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Flexible 3D Kirigami Probes for In Vitro and In Vivo Neural Applications.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2025Article
- Microelectrode Implantation in Human Insula: Technical Challenges and Recording Insights.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- A neural computational framework for face processing in the human temporal lobe.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Memory updating and the structure of event representations.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Distinct attentional characteristics of neurons with visual feature coding in the primate brain.Science advances · 2025Article
- A neuronal code for object representation and memory in the human amygdala and hippocampus.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A human single-neuron dataset for object recognition.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Domain-specific representation of social inference by neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus.Science advances · 2024Article
- Persistent activity during working memory maintenance predicts long-term memory formation in the human hippocampus.Neuron · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Deciphering the mechanisms of human memory is a central goal of neuroscience, both from the point of view of the fundamental biology of memory and for its translational relevance. Here, we review some contributions that recordings from neurons in humans implanted with electrodes for clinical purposes have made toward this goal. Recordings from the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus, reveal the existence of two classes of cells: those encoding highly selective and invariant representations of abstract concepts, and memory-selective cells whose activity is related to familiarity and episodic retrieval. Insights derived from observing these cells in behaving humans include that semantic representations are activated before episodic representations, that memory content and memory strength are segregated, and that the activity of both types of cells is related to subjective awareness as expected from a substrate for declarative memory. Visually selective cells can remain persistently active for several seconds, thereby revealing a cellular substrate for working memory in humans. An overarching insight is that the neural code of human memory is interpretable at the single-neuron level. Jointly, intracranial recording studies are starting to reveal aspects of the building blocks of human memory at the single-cell level. This work establishes a bridge to cellular-level work in animals on the one hand, and the extensive literature on noninvasive imaging in humans on the other hand. More broadly, this work is a step toward a detailed mechanistic understanding of human memory that is needed to develop therapies for human memory disorders.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.