People love stories. We find it easier to remember events when they are part of an overarching narrative. But in real life, the chapters of a story don’t follow smoothly one from another. Other things happen in between. A new brain imaging study from the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, shows that the hippocampus is the brain’s storyteller, connecting separate, distant events into a single narrative. The work is published Sept. 29 in Current Biology.
“Things that happen in real life don’t always connect directly, but we can remember the details of each event better if they form a coherent narrative,” said Brendan Cohn-Sheehy, a M.D./Ph.D. student at UC Davis and first author on the paper.
Cohn-Sheehy and colleagues at Professor Charan Ranganath’s Dynamic Memory Laboratory at the Center for Neuroscience used functional MRI to image the hippocampus of…
