How do our brains remember?
The way in which our brains retrieve memories is still quite poorly understood, and we often remember moments and events in a general fashion, without recalling exact details. Why is that?
"We know that our memories are not exact replicas of the things we originally experienced," says Juan Linde-Domingo, a researcher from the School of Psychology & Centre for Human Brain Health at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
Linde-Domingo and colleagues from the University of Birmingham and the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre, in Wales, recently investigated how our brains recall set memories and what this shows about the way in which we remember events.
"Memory is a reconstructive process, biased by personal knowledge and worldviews — sometimes we even remember events that never actually happened," says lead author Linde-Domingo, though, he adds, "exactly how memories are reconstructed in the brain, step by step, is currently not well-understood."
This is what the researchers have been trying to determine by "decoding" the process through which the brain finds and reconstructs memories.
The investigators' findings appear in the journal Nature Communications, and they can be accessed online.
