How does the human brain decide which memories to store?

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In a year alone, we experience hundreds of thousands of small events that have the potential to become memories. Yet our brain will only store a certain number of these memories (or at least only allow us access to some of them).

How does the brain decide which memories are stored?

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tynamite

First things first
Nobody really knows how the brain works, including scientists. What we do know, is which areas of the brain correspond to what. We don't know why the brain behaves the way it does (like we do with circuits), but we do know what we can do to make the brain behave in certain ways. We can do CAT scans on people's brains to know that Apple indicia triggers the same responses as religious people around holy things, but we don't exactly know why.

You must understand this before you can continue.
For anyone who doesn't understand, I'll give you a good analogy.

monkey smile

What emotion do you think the monkey above is feeling? Are they happy? No. Actually they are anxious. We know what responses they exhibit when they feel/think/do certain things, but we do not know why their brain incites them to behave the way they do. We can only map the trigger with the response, not the cause. No anthropomorphism needed.

curious george

Sorry George, you're not needed here.

Now to answer the question

Picture in your mind a happy scene from your past and then imagine being able to record it - maybe even upload it to YouTube.

It is still a distant possibility, but researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a system which can scan your mind and create a visual reconstruction of your thoughts.

The software creates a reconstruction of a person's thoughts.

They hope that eventually the breakthrough could lead to helping stroke victims, coma patients and people with neurodegenerative diseases [such as Alzheimers].

"This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery," said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and co-author of the study.

"We are opening a window into the movies in our minds."

The technology uses functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure blood flow to certain areas of the brain used to visualise certain shapes in our minds.

A recorded image of brain

The software creates a reconstruction of a person's thoughts.

Researchers fed 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into a computer programme which predicted the type of brain activity it was likely to provoke.

The software would then measure the real brain waves of participants, matching those to the predictions.

The programme goes on to gather a selection of clips, which it believes match the brainwaves most closely, producing a composite video to complete the reconstruction.

The resulting images are far from high-definition - visualisations of a scene involving actor Steve Martin show a blurry, unrecognisable outline - but researchers believe it is an important first step.

"We need to know how the brain works in naturalistic conditions," said Shinji Nishimoto, lead author of the study.

http://news.sky.com/home/technology/article/16075618

How does it work?
So basically, the software scans millions of YouTube videos, and compares their [thought] results to a map of people's brain scans.

This is very much like Google translate: scanning millions of phrases, and comparing them to the results of translated documents that us people have provided to our works.

This is very much like learning a foreign language abroad like French, by scanning lots of phrases that people say in France, and then comparing/mapping the results that those words trigger.

We don't understand what the words foreign mean, we only know what they do - because we don't understand French.

Google doesn't understand what words mean or parts of speech, Google only knows that they double as in other languages - because Google doesn't understand language.

Scientists don't understand why your brain makes you behave in the way it does, as the brain is just electrical impulses. Scientists do not understand the subjective world, only the objective world (more about this in another answer I wrote). They only can map out the brain's activity to its triggered responses.

Electrical Impulses
The brain is the most advanced computer in the world and we don't know how it works. It just operates by electrical impulses. Why do people feel pain when pinched? "Ow!" ...... "It's only electrical impulses!" ;)

A teleporter works by disassembling your particles and putting them together again at your destination. So in theory if that technology was created, we could teleport food all around the world.

However your current emotional state would be lost if you were teleported. Why? Because your emotions are not stored in your brain as data. They are electrical impulses. I think that your memories and personality would be fine if you was teleported (disassembled and assembled) based on evidence of heart transplants and comas, but your emotional state would be lost.

How these electrical impulses work, remain a mystery.

More information about how we don't understand the subjective world.
Adisa Nicholson's answer to Where does consciousness come from?