Author: Laura Sanders / Source: Science News
The brain’s hippocampi may be the film editors of our lives, slicing our continuous experiences into discrete cuts that can be stored away as memories.
That’s the idea raised by a new study that analyzed brain scan data from people watching films such as “Forrest Gump.”“Research like this helps us identify ‘What is an event, from the point of view of the brain?’ ” says memory psychologist Gabriel Radvansky of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
Many laboratory tests of memory involve taking in discrete, dull lists of information. “So much research is done with these little bits and pieces — words, pictures, things like that,” Radvansky says. But those dry tidbits aren’t what the human brain usually handles. “The mind is built to deal with complex events.”
As a closer approximation to real life, researchers used brain imaging data collected earlier…
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