In a groundbreaking study, researchers have learned that the human brain replays past events to make sense of what’s happening in the present.
This phenomenon goes beyond spatial experience and occurs in non-spatial experience as well. It provides insights into how our brains create narratives and help us make sense of the world.
The findings were published in Nature Neuroscienceshow that this process mirrors the mental replay observed in rodents to understand their spatial environment.
Researchers from University College London and Queen Mary University have delved into the idea that the human brain is involved in the replay of past events, even in non-spatial environments, and found that the reactivation process of past events in the human brain appears to be slower than that observed in rodents. Arrived more complicated.
“We know that the brain can ‘play back’ information it has encountered in the past, although this has mostly been studied in navigation tasks involving rodents,” said Avital Hahamy, one of the researchers who conducted the study. Medical as you like. “We also know that the human brain divides our ongoing experiences into smaller events, and we can later recall narratives of our daily experiences (for example, your morning events might include taking the subway to work, arriving at the office, attending a meeting, etc. .).
“We wondered whether the human brain also replays information from the past, linking these various events to form an overall understanding of our experiences (for example, by linking present events to past events, allowing us to understand why meetings start without us, such as being late).”
The researchers asked participants to watch a movie or listen to a story while they recalled their real-world experience, using an fMRI scanner to record their brain activity. The study found that the human brain replays past events as it engages in narrative. This replay process helps to understand the ongoing experience. Unlike in rodents, this replay occurs as events unfold, rather than during breaks.
“We found that the same brain regions that replay spatial information in rodent brains also replay narrative events in humans,” Hahami said. “In other words, replay, previously thought to primarily support spatial navigation, may also underlie the human ability to comprehend narratives. Furthermore, while studies in rodents have shown that replay is used to store past events into memory, primarily in the Rodents rest or sleep, and we suggest that it could also be used to understand the present moment in time as events occur.”
Published by Medicaldaily.com