In a groundbreaking study, researchers have understood that the human brain replays past events to make sense of the current occurrence.
This phenomenon extends beyond spatial experiences and occurs during non-spatial experiences as well. It provides insights into how our brains create narratives and helps us make sense of the world.
The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, indicated the method mirrors the mental replay observed in rodents to know their spatial environment.
Researchers on the University College and the Queen Mary University in London delved into the concept that the human brain engages within the replay of past events, even in non-spatial contexts, and located the reactivation strategy of past events within the human brain appears to be more intricate than what’s observed in rodents.
“We all know that the brain can ‘replay’ information that was encountered previously, although this has mainly been studied in navigation tasks involving rodents,” Avital Hahamy, certainly one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Medical Xpress. “We also know that the human brain chunks our ongoing experience into smaller events that we will later recall as a narrative of our each day experience (e.g., your morning events might include taking the tube to work, reaching the office, going into a gathering, etc.).
“We wondered whether the human brain also replays past information to attach these different events into an overarching understanding of our experiences (e.g., allowing us to know why a gathering began without us by linking this present event to a past event, similar to the tube running late).”
The researchers asked participants to observe a movie or hearken to narrated stories, while their brain activity was recorded using an fMRI scanner considering they invoke real-world experiences. The study found the human brain replays past events during engagement with narratives. This replay process aids in comprehending ongoing experiences. Unlike rodents, this replay occurs while events are unfolding reasonably than during times of rest.
“We found that the identical brain regions that replay spatial information within the rodent brain also replay narrative events within the human brain,” Hahamy said. “In other words, replay, previously thought to mainly support spatial navigation, could also underlie the human ability to make sense of narratives. Furthermore, while research in rodents proposed that replay is used to store past events into memory, mostly when rodents rest or sleep, we advise it might even be used to make sense of the current, on the fly, while events are unfolding.”
Published by Medicaldaily.com