Distort memories to memorize them better. Here’s what our brain is able to do: a trick that allows our personal archive not to confuse memories that are very similar to each other, to avoid making them end up in oblivion.
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The discovery by neuroscientists at the University of Oregon and New York University shows that to remember similar events the brain exaggerates the differences, thus improving memory performance. In fact, it seems that the similarity between memories is the first cause of amnesia: amplifying the differences between one memory and another, therefore, proves to be an excellent method for reducing interference, even if it testifies to the presence in our brain of thousands of distorted memories that we consider true.
It will have happened to everyone to tell something we experienced years ago, perhaps during one of the many family dinners, and to be contradicted by a relative present that day, who does not remember the story exactly that way. Who was right? Probably neither. This is demonstrated on a practical level by the study coordinated by the researcher Yufei Zhao, published in the scientific journal JNeurosci. The participants in the research had to memorize 24 faces coupled with objects, such as a hat, a balloon or an umbrella, some of the same color, others of similar but different shades. Just like with similar memories, such as where we parked the car outside the house, two objects that are the same but of slightly different shades should be more difficult to remember than two different but of the same color. So, to better remember them, the brain would have to exaggerate the gap between the colors. And it is precisely about this that they were questioned.
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The 29 participants were asked to imagine the object corresponding to the face during a functional MRI, and then indicate the right shape and color on a color wheel. And the result was that the memory revealed an exaggeration of the color differences between similar objects, activating the lateral parietal cortex, which is located under the top of the skull, in recalling memory. Not only. Exaggeration was also associated with greater accuracy. Those who exaggerated the color differences the most were the ones who best remembered the combination.
Taken together, these results reveal that competition between memories induces adaptive and specific distortions in parietal representations and corresponding behavioral expressions.
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In other words, when people exaggerate the differences between similar memories, they recall them better. “It is very fascinating to see that memory distortions can actually help us distinguish similar memories,” said researcher Yufei Zhao, a PhD student in Psychology at the University of Oregon, who previously conducted research on the hippocampus and in her role as a encoding of memories. Previous brain imaging studies had shown some differences in how the hippocampus handled memories of two very similar events, but it wasn’t clear if there were any changes in the content of the memory itself. Now these findings could help explain why memory works this way and why it declines with age.
The participants were in fact young and healthy: 98.9% remembered the right face-object correspondence while 93.2% also remembered exactly the couples with the same objects of different color. The next step will now be to study the elderly. Memory performance declines as we age, and one reason may be that the brain becomes less adept at reducing interference between memories.
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