Hippocampus: Memory is just telling stories

Human love story

"What happens in real life is not always directly connected, but if they form a coherent narrative, we can better remember the details of everything," said a student at the University of California, Davis, thesis no.

Cohn-Sheehy and his colleagues in the Dynamic Memory Laboratory of Professor Charan Ranganath of the Neuroscience Center used functional MRI to image the hippocampus of volunteers as they were learning and recalling a series of short stories

These stories are created specifically for research, highlighting primary and secondary characters and an event

Researchers played recordings of stories to volunteers on a functional MRI scanner

Unsurprisingly, they found that the fragments of learning coherent stories were more similar than the fragments of learning disjointed stories

"When you see the second event, you go back to the first event and embed a part of it in the new memory," he said

Hippocampus weaving memory

Next, they compared the patterns of the hippocampus in the learning and retrieval process

Cohn-Sheehy said: "The second event is where the hippocampus forms connected memories

When the researchers tested the volunteers' memory of the story, they found that the ability to bring back the hippocampal activity of the second event was related to the number of details that the volunteers could recall

Cohn-Sheehy said that although other parts of the brain are also involved in the memory process, the hippocampus seems to piece together fragments across time to form interconnected narrative memories

This work is part of a new era in memory research

He said: "We are using brain imaging technology to understand the real memory process

Research on the memory process may eventually lead to better clinical tests for early memory decline caused by aging or dementia, or to assess the damage to memory caused by brain damage

Current Biology

DOI

10.