Researchers Discover How Memories Are Packaged

University of California, Irvine researchers have released a report which may help to explain why some memories are more vivid than others.

Employing an fMRI to study individuals who experienced and then recalled a complex event, scientists found that those who remembered multiple features of the memory activated a part of the brain called the intra-parietal sulcus which binded the details together. Meanwhile, when participants could only remember one or two details about the memory, it was far less likely that the intra-parietal sulcus had been used.

Said lead author Melina Uncapher:

"This study provides empirical evidence for how critical this region is for bringing the constituents of a memory together in the brain...A complete memory of an event requires that the features of the event be brought together and processed by the brain as a common perceptual representation, before being stored."

Read more: Memories: It's all in the packaging, scientists say

ABSTRACT: Episodic Encoding Is More than the Sum of Its Parts: An fMRI Investigation of Multifeatural Contextual Encoding