Experiments have shown how the hippocampus fragments continuous personal experiences into individual events before they turn into memories.
Small structures in the hippocampus, hidden deep in the temporal regions of the brain, play a key role in retaining attention and consolidating memory. Psychologists are actively exploring this function, identifying individual fragments of experience that the hippocampus turns into memories. However, Aya Ben-Yakov and Richard Henson of the University of Cambridge observed that, initially, experience is perceived as a continuous sequence of experiences - therefore, the brain must be able to fragment it for further manipulation.
Ben-Yaakov and Henson describe their recent experiments in an article published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The authors monitored the brain activity of volunteers of both sexes, divided into two groups: the first, while in the tomograph, watched a short 8.5-minute video ("Hands up!" By Alfred Hitchcock), and the second - a full-length film ("Forrest Gump" by Robert Zemeckis) … A separate group of observers was tasked with reviewing both recordings and “tagging” their timing by pressing a button to separate each event on screen.
Comparing the changes in brain activity with this timing of events, scientists noticed a high correlation between them, and the hippocampus showed these fluctuations most clearly, showing pronounced peaks at each scene change. It is also important that such a “montage of the hippocampus” may outwardly not coincide with the montage of events in the film. For example, in the opening scene of Forrest Gump, the hero sits silently on a bench for a long time until he says: “Hello. My name is Forrest. Forrest Gump”- for the hippocampus, this scene is divided into two parts.
Sergey Vasiliev
