Why you'll never forget your first kiss

WHETHER it was behind the school canteen or in the back row of the cinema, your first kiss is an unforgettable memory - and there's a reason for that.

Was your first kiss on the beach?

CAN you recall your first kiss? Or the first time you drove a car? What about your first school dance?

The brain has a fascinating way of acting like a wax tablet when it comes to recording memories. Warm or emotionally-charged moments have a tendency to stick in our minds - and according to neuroscientist Sebastian Seung, there's a reason for that.

Mr Seung told television anchor Jane Pauley that our brains act as a map of connections, which allows certain memories to last well beyond their original occurrence.

"The memory of a kiss is interesting, because you ask people, what's your first memory? It's a childhood thing, something with your mother, something wonderful and warm. And then you ask the next memory and we fast forward to the memory of your first kiss, something that happens when you're more of an adult. It's emotionally laden, and so it's seared into your memory.

"The memory is retrievable. Some memories are so persistant that you will never forget. They will endure for a lifetime ... there is a material basis for that persistence."

Mr Seung also explained how the brain works, likening it to the way an airline connects thousands of difference cities on a map.

"On a flight map you have the airports and the cities and the routes between the cities," he says. "Imagine each one of those cities is replaced by a neuron. And each one of those flights between a city is a connection. And imagine representing your brain as a map like that with 100 billion cities, and 10 thousand flights per city. There's a map like that for your entire brain, and that's called your 'connectome' - the complete map of all the neurol connections in your brain. The brain contains 100 billion neurons, every neuron might have 10 thousand connections ... it creates a map in your brain, a connectome.

"One of the hypotheses that we would like to test in neuroscience is that your memories, like the memory of your first kiss, are stored in this gigantic pattern of connections inside the map [of your brain]," he said.

How memorable was your first kiss? Tell us below

Check out the video below of Mr Seung and Jane Pauley for more on the persistence of certain memories.

News_Rich_Media: Memory persistance explained

Experience more fascinating conversations like this live at the Rubin Museum in New York.

This story includes excerpts from the Huffington Post