When we remember past events, we often relive events as if everything were happening in the present moment. New research has revealed how this happens in our brains.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, shows that when someone tries to remember one aspect of an event, the brain revives the whole situation; for example, when you remember someone you’ve known for some time, the brain revives everything. including the location and what I was doing at the time.
Remembering past events allows us to immerse ourselves in the experience.
“When we remember a fact from the past, we have the ability to relive all events,” says Dr. Aidan Horner of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
According to Hormer, we remembered where we were, the music that sounded, who and what we were talking about.
Explains that since we are experiencing an event, all the different aspects are recorded in different regions of the brain, however, we are able to remember all aspects at all times.
The hippocampus is fundamental in the process of recovering memories, because it is in this region that all aspects are combined, so that past events can be recovered.
For example, if we remember something we saw, we remember all the details, which means that we can relive the whole situation.
Using functional MRI images, researchers showed that different aspects of an imagined event are reflected in activity in different regions of the brain.
When research participants were asked about a particular aspect of an event, the activity of the hippocampus is integrated into the response of the regions responsible for this aspect, this reactivation accompanies every memory that comes to mind.
Neill Burgess, who was also involved in research, explains that this work shows a model for calculating how memory works, where the hippocampus allows different information to be connected so that it can be memorized as a coherent fact, when we want to remember what happened. .
In addition, it provides a critical view of our ability to remember what happened and can help us understand how this process can fail in conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease or post-traumatic stress disorder.
The experiment was conducted with 26 volunteers, invited to imagine and memorize a series of events involving different places, characters and famous objects.
They were subsequently asked to remember the details of an event on the basis of a single data; for example, in one of the situations in this study, they were asked to imagine an event where President Obama was in the kitchen with a hammer. in his hand.
They then asked volunteers to remember this situation in detail from a single piece of information, such as where Obama was or what was in his hand.
At this stage, when asked to remember the events, volunteers underwent a functional MRI to measure their brain activity.
Using the example above, brain activity increased in one area of the brain when volunteers thought of Obama and other areas when they thought about cooking and hammering.
The study concluded that when asked where Obama was, there was an increase in brain activity in Obama’s areas, cooking and hammering.
This reactivation related to hippocampus activity shows that it is involved in the recovery of event memories.
This is the first research to provide evidence of this process of memory formation in the human hippocampus and the first to link this to the daily experience of remembering past events.