Your Brain's Memory of a Story Depends on How It Was Told

"Tell me about what you had for dinner last night. There are different ways you could fill in the details of that story. You could give perceptual descriptions of how your food looked and tasted. Or you could focus more on conceptual experiences, such as what that food made you think and feel. In a new brain scan study, neuroscientists found that telling the same story different ways activates different memory mechanisms in the listener's brain, shaping how someone remembers what you told them."

"The results were published in JNeurosci on Monday and will be presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference next month. Memories aren't stored in one place in the brain. Instead memory traces are distributed throughout networks in the brain's outer layers. These networks connect to a deep-brain structure called the hippocampus, which helps form, index and retrieve memories. When forming a memory, the hippocampus tends to engage with some of these brain networks more than others."

Perceptual storytelling emphasizes sensory details while conceptual storytelling emphasizes thoughts and feelings. Brain-scan evidence shows that presenting the same narrative in these two ways engages different cortical networks that connect with the hippocampus. Both perceptual and conceptual forms produced roughly equal recall, but encoding and retrieval relied on distinct hippocampal-network interactions. Memory traces are distributed across cortical networks, and the hippocampus preferentially couples with particular networks during memory formation. Individual differences emerge, with some people better at recalling perceptual details and others better at recalling conceptual content. These differences may explain why people vary in which story details they remember.

Read at www.scientificamerican.com