A new study has revealed that human memory edits the past with current information and updates the recollections with new experiences, thus suggesting that love at first sight is more likely a trick of your memory than a Hollywood-worthy moment.
The new research revealed that in terms of accuracy, it's no video camera, suggesting memory reframes and edits events to create a story to fit your current world. It's built to be current.
it revealed that love at first sight, for example, is more likely a trick of your memory than a Hollywood-worthy moment.
"When you think back to when you met your current partner, you may recall this feeling of love and euphoria," lead author Donna Jo Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow in medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said. "But you may be projecting your current feelings back to the original encounter with this person."
This the first study to show specifically how memory is faulty, and how it can insert things from the present into memories of the past when those memories are retrieved.
The study showed the exact point in time when that incorrectly recalled information gets implanted into an existing memory.
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To help us survive, Bridge said, our memories adapt to an ever-changing environment and help us deal with what's important now.
All that editing happens in the hippocampus, the new study found. The hippocampus, in this function, is the memory's equivalent of a film editor and special effects team.
The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.