How Much Detail We Can Remember of an Event Depends on the Brain's 'Packaging' Ability

Some people remember more details of an event and others remember less of what happened at a certain point in the past. How much detail an individual is able to bring back to mind from recollections depends on the ability of a certain part of the brain to 'package' from the event. A recent study carried out by researchers at the University of California, Irwine found that the brain does not use only one region to store the memories - it is a more complex phenomenon and there is the need to activate a particular brain area when the event occurs to bound all the aspects of the experience and further help an individual remember all the details of the event. If the particular neural portion is not activated at the moment when the event takes place, then the person is not able to bring to mind later and remember all the details of a past happening, but only sequences of it.

Michael Rugg, senior author of the paper published in the Neuron Journal said that the results of the study only found grounds for what has been believed for years now, as one cannot remember the details of a certain event in the past if he did not pay attention to what happened then: "This study provides a neurological basis for what psychologists have been telling us for years. You can't get out of memory what you didn't put into it. It is not possible to remember things later if you didn't pay attention to them in the first place." Michael Rugg is the Director of University of California, Irwine's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

The study was conducted on 23 subjects who underwent fMRI scans on the brain while doing some memory tests. Overall results showed that there are particular regions of the brain which are involved in 'packaging' a memory - for instance, if a subject could remember the color of a word previously shown to him, then the color processing neural region was involved, if he could remember the location of a certain word, then the spatial processing was involved etc. However, this is not all that it takes for binding together all the information necessary for remembering all the details - and this is when the intra-parietal sulcus, a parietal cortex region, gets involved. This particular neural area was found by scientists to play the key-role in connecting all aspects of an event and helping one fully bring to mind past happenings.

Lead author of the study Melina Uncapher, graduate student researcher at the UCI concluded: "We know that if the intra-parietal sulcus is damaged, then someone cannot attend to multiple aspects of the same object, such as its size and color. This study provides empirical evidence for how critical this region is for bringing the constituents of a memory together in the brain. Memory is more than a sum of its parts. A complete memory of an event requires that the features of the event be brought together and processed by the brain as a common perceptual representation, before being stored."