The work is part of a new era in memory research. While other parts of the brain are involved in the process of memory, the hippocampus appears to bring pieces together across time and form them into connected, narrative memories, Cohn-Sheehy said. When the researchers tested the volunteers’ memory of stories, they found that the ability to bring back hippocampal activity of the second event was linked to the amount of detail the volunteers could recall. “The second event is where the hippocampus is forming a connected memory,” Cohn-Sheehy said. They found that when recalling stories that formed a coherent narrative, the hippocampus activates more information about the second event than when recalling nonconnected stories. Next, they compared hippocampal patterns during learning and retrieval. “When you get to the second event, you’re reaching back to the first event and embedding part of it in the new memory,” he said. The results show the coherent memories being woven together, Cohn-Sheehy said. The researchers compared the patterns of activity in the hippocampus between learning and recalling the different stories.Īs expected, they saw more similarity for learning pieces of a coherent story than for stories that did not connect. The next day, they scanned them again as the volunteers recalled the stories into a microphone. The researchers played recordings of the stories to the volunteers in the fMRI scanner. The stories were constructed so that some formed connected, two-part narratives and others did not. The stories, created specifically for the study, featured main and side characters and an event. student at UC Davis and first author on the paper.Ĭohn-Sheehy and colleagues at Professor Charan Ranganath’s Dynamic Memory Laboratory at the Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology used functional MRI to image the hippocampus of volunteers as they learned and recalled a series of short stories. “Things that happen in real life don’t always connect directly, but we can remember the details of each event better if they form a coherent narrative,” said Brendan Cohn-Sheehy, an M.D./Ph.D. A new brain imaging study from the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, shows that the hippocampus is the brain’s storyteller, connecting separate, distant events into a single narrative. But in real life, the chapters of a story don’t follow smoothly one from another. We find it easier to remember events when they are part of an overarching narrative.
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