'Mental Time Travel'
July 21st 2011 22:08
Memories formed in the same context become linked, supporting the foundation of episodic memory one memory triggering another.
Theories of episodic memory suggest that when I remember an event, I retrieve its earlier context and make it part of my present context, said co-author Michael Kahana at the University of Pennsylvania.
To investigate the neurobiological evidence for this theory, the Penn team combined a centuries-old psychological research technique having subjects memorize and recall a list of 15 unrelated words.
With these recordings, we can relate what happens in the memory experiment on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis to what's changing in the brain, Kahana said.
The scientists found that the brain activity of the recalled word is the same as when the word is first memorized.
In addition, the brain activity of the recalled contained traces of other words that were studied prior to the recalled word.
The findings provide a brain-based explanation of a memory phenomenon that people experience every day.
This is why two friends you met at different points in your life can become linked in your memory, Kahana said.
Along your autobiographical timeline, contextual associations will exist at every time scale, from experiences that take place over the course of years to experiences that take place over the course of minutes, like studying words on a list, he added.
The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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