Here's how our brains may reconstruct past events

A new research has revealed how the human brain might reconstruct past events.

When someone tries to remember 1 aspect of an event, such as who they met yesterday, the representation of the entire event can be reactivated in the brain, including incidental information such as where they were and what they did

When remembering something from our past, we often vividly re-experience the whole episode in which it occurred. New UCL research has now revealed how this might happen in the brain.

The study shows that when someone tries to remember one aspect of an event, such as who they met yesterday, the representation of the entire event can be reactivated in the brain, including incidental information such as where they were and what they did.

When people recall a previous life event, they have the ability to re-immerse themselves in the experience, explained lead author Aidan Horner, adding that they remember the room they were in, the music that was playing, the person they were talking to and what they were saying.

Horner added that when humans first experience the event, all these distinct aspects are represented in different regions of the brain, yet they are still able to remember them all later on. It is the hippocampus that is critical to this process, associating all these different aspects so that the entire event can be retrieved.

The researchers showed that associations formed between the different aspects of an event allow one aspect to retrieve all the other aspects, a process known as "pattern completion."

The results showed that different parts of the brain showed increased activity when encoding different aspects of each event, and that the hippocampus provides the critical links between them to form a complete memory.

The study is published in Nature Communications.