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How is it possible that a lifetime of experiences and accumulated knowledge can be stored in neurons? 

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These results suggest that although information stored in individual neurons is relatively labile, it is very stable in networks of synchronously active neurons.
The number of memories which can be stored and retrieved without degradation is primarily a function of the number of active neurons when a memory is recalled and the degree of connectivity in the network.
We hypothesize that the hippocampus is a memory device that takes advantage of the correlations between sensory experiences to generate compressed representations of the episodes that are stored in memory.

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