After an unforgettable dinner at a restaurant, it’s not just the food that leaves a trace in your mind. The odors, the decor, the sound of the band playing, the conversations, and many other features combine to form a distinctive memory of the night. Later, reviving any one of these impressions alone may be sufficient to bring back the entire experience.
A new study now reveals that in the brain, a complex memory similarly consists of a whole and its parts. The researchers found that while the overall experience is stored in the hippocampus, the brain structure long considered the seat of memory, the individual details are parsed and stored elsewhere, in the prefrontal cortex. This separation ensures that, in the future, exposure to any individual cue is sufficient to activate the prefrontal cortex, which then accesses the hippocampus for recall of the whole memory.
The findings,…
