Tomography of memory engrams in self-organizing nanowire connectomes

Abstract

Self-organizing memristive nanowire connectomes have been exploited for physical (in materia) implementation of brain-inspired computing paradigms. Despite the emergent behavior was shown to rely on weight plasticity at single junction/synapse level and wiring plasticity involving topological changes, a shift to multiterminal paradigms is needed to unveil dynamics at the network level. Here, we report on tomographical evidence of memory engrams(or memory traces) in nanowire connectomes, i.e., chemical and physical changes in biological neural substrates supposed to endow the representation of experience stored in the brain. An experimental/modeling approach shows that spatially correlated short-term plasticity effects can turn into long-lasting engram memory patterns inherently related to network topology inhomogeneities. The ability to exploit both encoding and consolidation of information on the same physical substrate would open radically new perspectives for in materiacomputing, while offering to neuroscientists an alternative platform to understand the role of memory in learning and knowledge.