Hippocampus is the brain's storyteller

Date:
September 29, 2021
Source:
University of California - Davis
Summary:
A new brain imaging study shows that the hippocampus is the
brain's storyteller, connecting separate, distant events into a
single narrative.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== People love stories. We find it easier to remember events when they are
part of an overarching narrative. But in real life, the chapters of a
story don't follow smoothly one from another. Other things happen in
between. A new brain imaging study from the Center for Neuroscience at
the University of California, Davis, shows that the hippocampus is the
brain's storyteller, connecting separate, distant events into a single narrative. The work is published Sept.

29 in Current Biology.


========================================================================== "Things that happen in real life don't always connect directly, but we
can remember the details of each event better if they form a coherent narrative," said Brendan Cohn-Sheehy, a M.D./Ph.D. student at UC Davis
and first author on the paper.

Cohn-Sheehy and colleagues at Professor Charan Ranganath's Dynamic Memory Laboratory at the Center for Neuroscience used functional MRI to image
the hippocampus of volunteers as they learned and recalled a series of
short stories.

The stories, created specifically for the study, featured main and side characters and an event. The stories were constructed so that some formed connected, two-part narratives and others did not.

The researchers played recordings of the stories to the volunteers in
the fMRI scanner. The next day, they scanned them again as the volunteers recalled the stories. The researchers compared the patterns of activity
in the hippocampus between learning and recalling the different stories.

As expected, they saw more similarity for learning pieces of a coherent
story than for stories that did not connect. The results show the coherent memories being woven together, Cohn-Sheehy said.



========================================================================== "When you get to the second event, you're reaching back to the first
event and embedding part of it in the new memory," he said.

Hippocampus weaves memories Next, they compared hippocampal patterns
during learning and retrieval. They found that when recalling stories that formed a coherent narrative, the hippocampus activates more information
about the second event than when recalling non-connected stories.

"The second event is where the hippocampus is forming a connected memory," Cohn-Sheehy said.

When the researchers tested the volunteers' memory of stories, they found
that the ability to bring back hippocampal activity of the second event
was linked to the amount of detail the volunteers could recall.



========================================================================== While other parts of the brain are involved in the process of memory,
the hippocampus appears to bring pieces together across time and form
them into connected, narrative memories, Cohn-Sheehy said.

The work is part of a new era in memory research. Traditionally, in neuroscience, researchers have studied the basic processes of memory
involving disconnected pieces of information, whereas psychology has a tradition of studying how memory works to capture and connect events in
the "real world." These two camps are starting to merge, Cohn-Sheehy
said.

"We're using brain imaging to get at realistic memory processes," he said.

Research on memory processes could ultimately lead to better clinical
tests for early stages of memory decline in aging or dementia, or for
assessing damage to memory from brain injuries.

Additional authors on the study are: Jordan Crivelli-Decker, Kamin Kim
and Alexander Barnett at UC Davis; and Angelique Delarazan, Zachariah
Reagh and Jeffrey Zacks at Washington University St. Louis. The work
was partly funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the National Institute of Aging.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
University_of_California_-_Davis. Original written by Andrew Fell. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Brendan I. Cohn-Sheehy, Angelique I. Delarazan, Zachariah M. Reagh,
Jordan E. Crivelli-Decker, Kamin Kim, Alexander J. Barnett,
Jeffrey M.

Zacks, Charan Ranganath. The hippocampus constructs narrative
memories across distant events. Current Biology, 2021 DOI: 10.1016/
j.cub.2021.09.013 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/09/210929112809.htm

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