RECALL
"You must remember this," insists the theme from Casablanca, but how to predict what your mind will retain and what escapes as time goes by? Thanks to new developments in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), two new studies report that the birth of a memory relies on sparks in two particular regions of the brain.
Neuroscientist Anthony Wagner, Ph.D., led a Harvard study which showed sets of random words to subjects undergoing brain scans. Later, they were given a list of terms and asked to identify which they'd seen during the fMRI. The researchers found that the words each subject recalled corresponded to high activity in the left prefrontal cortex, thought to regulate verbal working memory, and the left hippocampal cortex, believed to encode long-term memories.
Stanford neuroscientist James Brewer performed a similar experiment, this time focusing on recall of images. He found that activation in the hippocampal and right frontal cortices, which may regulate spatial memory, matched up with the pictures that subjects remembered. Both studies indicate that high activity in specific brain areas during an event can predict whether or not it will be recalled. Knowing just what information triggers memory could be useful to many people--like advertisers or teachers.
