The functioning of our brain is a constant object of study to unravel how we process information and how our memory works. Has it ever occurred to you to share an anecdote about your childhood and have your parents remember it differently than you? This occurs because our memory is not exact or precise, but rather restructures memories according to the influence of our past and present experiences.
This was demonstrated by a study published in 2014 in the Journal of Neuroscience, carried out by researchers from the Department of Medicine at Northwestern University. According to this research, our memory rewrites the past with current information, updating our memories with new experiences.
17 people participated in this study, who observed the location of 168 figures on different backgrounds on a computer screen. Next, they were asked to place those figures in the same place, but on a different background and none of them got it right. Afterwards, they were presented with the figures in three different positions on the original background and had to indicate their initial position. All participants placed the silhouettes where they themselves positioned them in the previous trial instead of their original position.
According to the authors of the research, this shows that the memory of the original location had changed to be replaced by the place they remembered on the second background. That is, his memory had updated the information by inserting new data.
During the test, the participants were inside an MRI machine so that the researchers recorded their brain activity and eye movement. They then discovered that the person responsible for this alteration of our memory is the hippocampus, which acts as a kind of editor of our memories.
The researchers referred to this process as associative novelty binding, by which the hippocampus binds memory features to associatively novel information. To illustrate her finding, Donna Jo Bridge, one of the study's lead authors, used the example of love at first sight. “When you think about when you met your current partner, you may remember this feeling of love and euphoria, but you may be projecting your current feelings onto the original meeting with this person,” she explained. In other words, the feelings of love you now feel towards that person condition your memory of when you first met.
In this regard, the researchers highlighted the implications of their study for witness testimony in court. “Our memory is made to change, not to regurgitate facts, so we are not very reliable witnesses,” Bridge said, while specifying that “although this occurred in a laboratory, it is reasonable to think that memory behaves this way in the environment.” real world".
