Your brain is constantly evaluating which aspects of your experiences to either remember for later, ignore, or forget. Dartmouth researchers have developed a new approach for studying these aspects of memory, by creating a computer program that turns sequences of events from a video into unique geometric shapes. These shapes can then be compared to the shapes of how people recounted the events. The study provides new insight into how experiences are committed to memory and recounted to others. The results are published in Nature Human Behavior and were based on how people remembered the experience of watching an episode of Sherlock, a BBC television show.
“When we represent experiences and memories as shapes, we can use the tools provided by the field of geometry to explore how we remember our experiences, and to test theories of how we think, learn, remember, and communicate,”…
