(July 2, 2015) When remembering something from our past, we
often vividly re-experience the whole episode in which it occurred. New UCL
research funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust has now
revealed how this might happen in the brain.
The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that
when someone tries to remember one aspect of an event, such as who they met
yesterday, the representation of the entire event can be reactivated in the
brain, including incidental information such as where they were and what they
did.
“When we recall a previous life event, we have the ability
to re-immerse ourselves in the experience,” explains lead author Dr Aidan
Horner (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience & Institute of Neurology).
“We remember the room we were in, the music that was playing, the person we
were talking to and what they were saying. When we first experience the event,
all these distinct aspects are represented in different regions of the brain,
yet we are still able to remember them all later on. It is the hippocampus that
is critical to this process, associating all these different aspects so that
the entire event can be retrieved.”