A scientific method identifies the memory as your brain activity
The finding allows us to understand how memories are stored and how they change over time.
One study suggests that it is possible to identify the specific memory that a person is recovering from last episode, only on the pattern of brain activity. The results of work carried out by University College London, UK, published in the online edition of the journal Current Biology.
Explains Eleanor Maguire, head of the study, “we have observed brain activity in search of a specific episodic memory, and examine the trace of real memory. We found that our memories are represented permanently in the hippocampus. Now we’ve seen where they are we have a chance to understand how memories are stored and how they might change over time. “
The results are a continuation of an earlier discovery of the scientific team, which showed that one could identify where he was a person inside a virtual reality room in the same way.
The researchers showed ten people one of three very short films before a brain scan. Each film was played by a different actress and a daily scenario quite similar. For example, in one of the shorter a woman looking in her purse to find an envelope in a mailbox and threw in another one of them a different actress ended her coffee cup and threw in a trash empty.
The scientists scanned the brains of participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while calling on those who remember the movie, and then included the image data in a computer log designed to identify patterns of brain activity, memories associated with every film.
Finally, the authors showed that these patterns could be identified in separate fMRI data to predict exactly what movie I was thinking about a particular person when he passed through the scanner.
The results imply that the neural traces of episodic memories are stable and therefore predictable, even after many reactivations. Although the patterns in the brain vary from one individual to another, the scientists also showed remarkable similarities to parts of the hippocampus that were active.
From the demo that you can access directly to information on individual episodic memories in the human hippocampus in vivo and noninvasively, the researchers conclude that the method offers new possibilities to examine the characteristics of episodic memory , to explore possible functional topographies and examine neural processing within the hippocampal subfields
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