MEXICO: For the first time, scientists have seen evidence of where the brain records the time and place of real-life memories.
Results showed that the similarity of the brain activation patterns when memories were recalled was an indicator of the breadth of space and time between the actual events.
Participants in the Ohio State University study wore a smartphone around their neck with an app that took random photos for a month. Later, when the participants relived memories related to those photos in an fMRI scanner, researchers found that a part of the brain’s hippocampus stores information about where and when their specific memories occurred.
In fact, the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that the further apart the memories occurred in space and time, the farther apart the memories’ representations appeared in the hippocampus.
“What we’re picking up here is not the whole memory, but the basic gist – the where and when of the experience,” said Per Sederberg, senior author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State.
“This could be viewed as the memory hub, where we have these general, large-scale representations of our experiences.”
Similar work has been done in rats – in fact the discovery of rat neurons that code for space won the Nobel Prize in Medicine last year. But in rats, the space they live in can be measured in feet.
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