UCI study may hold key to memory

The next time someone says they have no recollection of a particular incident, you may want to ask them to rephrase that, because a new study out of UC Irvine suggests otherwise.

According to Jeff Johnson of UCI’s Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, scientists discovered that a person’s brain activity when they remember something is very similar to the brain activity when they’re first experiencing it. This means that when you can’t clearly recollect something, it’s not a matter of not having an actual physical memory of the event, but a failure of your brain to retrieve it. If the details are still in the brain, that means scientists just have to figure out a way to get people to access them again, Johnson said.

UCI researchers used imaging equipment to study students’ brain activity when they were told to think about certain words and different ways they could be written, pronounced and sound backward. They asked the students 20 minutes later to think about the words and any details they could remember about them, and researchers noticed that the brain activity was strikingly similar, officials said.

Scientists noticed that even if the person could not remember the details, the brain followed the same path associated with that memory, meaning the brain knew something about the event even if the person didn’t, Johnson said.

— Joseph Serna