‘Time travel’ memory hack rejuvenates memories, study finds
Half -forgotten memories can be resurrected using a “mental time journey”, suggests a new study.
Research, published Monday July 28 in the journal PNAhas shown that a person can rejuvenate his discolored memories by recalling the emotions and thoughts she had when he stored this memory for the first time. In fact, the researchers found that the renovated memories were almost as recoverable as the newly formed memories.
The study specifically focused on memories of information learned, as opposed to memories of events, for example. When we learn something, this new memory vacillates on a forgetting curve, like a rock perched at the top of a large mountain. While this rock rolls down, we lose some details on memory. But when approaching the base of the Mountain of Memory, where the inclination is less steep, the rate of oblivion slows down.
There are processes that “make memories more and more stable and less sensitive to any type of oblivion process,” said the study co-author Karl-Heinz BäumlPsychologist at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Some details remain engraved in your memory, while others fade over time. But this oversight may not be inevitable, said Bäuml.
“You can reduce this type of forgetting if you travel mentally in time in the context of encoding”, that is to say when you have memory. In the new study, Bäuml and his colleagues explored how this mental time trip affected memory recovery.
The team recruited more than 1,200 volunteers. Half was responsible for studying a short passage, while the other half studied unrelated name lists. Each group was then divided into four sub-groups, which were invited to remember equipment in different ways.
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A group, which served as a point of comparison, was invited to recall the information they had just learned several times during the next hour, without performing additional steps. The other three groups had a gap of four hours, 24 hours or seven days between learning equipment and the memory test.
After being tested, these three groups were invited to travel in mental time, either by recalling the thoughts and feelings they had during their first laboratory session, either by examining a subset of the information they had learned, as a kind of primer to remember the rest. The comparison group was also retested at these last points, and their recall, without traveling in time, was used as a reference.
The two types of mental time travel helped restore the memories of the participants, passing their memories to some extent. In the four -hour brands, these tips have improved the recall by “reactivating” memories. The memory of the emotions of the previous coding has restored around 70% of the targeted memories after four hours and 59% after 24 hours, while selective priming restored around 84% and 68% of target memories at these times.
However, after a week, the effect of mental time travel had decreased. Remembering the emotions has restored no memory, while the priming only restored 31% of target memories.
Deniz VatanseverA cognitive neuroscientist from Fudan University in China who was not involved in the study, said new work refines our understanding of memory. “Memory is not only in linear decay, but in fact, we are able to reset it almost in its original form,” he said. However, he said that the real test would be to see how these results are generalized in life outside the laboratory.
“Autobiographical memories or other experiences that we have in daily life-they are rich in emotional content; they are rich in sensory methods,” he noted. In comparison, the memories of short passages and lists of words do not have these features.
Bäuml agreed that the degree of rejuvenation of memory will vary according to the factors not explored in this study, such as the richness of experiences remembered. But for the moment, he said that the evidence suggests that, if you aim to take an exam, it may be preferable to plan revision sessions with only short intervals between the two.
“The best way would be to distribute your mental reintegration a little and do it not only after seven days, but do it after three days, six days and so on,” he said. This “would create recurring rejuvenation cycles, which keep memories in all at a higher level,” he suggested.
While this study revealed that unique cases of time travel could push the souvenirs of the mountain, Other research suggested that repeated practice could make it more difficult for memory to take place in the first place, said Justin HulbertA neuroscientist from Bates College who was not involved in the study.
This could mean that memories must be refreshed regularly at first – after an hour or two – but that refreshments could wait later, perhaps months or years, said Hulbert. “This could mean that you have to push the rock on the mountain less than time to preserve this memory over long periods of time,” he said.
