Monday, January 26, 2015

Human brain keeps memories tidy by pruning inaccurate ones


Your brain is a memory powerhouse, constantly recording experiences in long-term memory. Those memories help you find your way through the world: Who works the counter each morning at your favorite coffee shop? How do you turn on the headlights of your car? What color is your best friend’s house? 

But then your barista leaves for law school, you finally buy a new car and your buddy spends the summer with a paint brush in hand. Suddenly, your memories are out of date.

An experiment conducted by Nicholas Turk-Browne, an associate professor of psychology at Princeton, and his colleagues found that the human brain uses memories to make predictions about what it expects to find in familiar contexts. When those subconscious predictions are shown to be wrong, the related memories are weakened and are more likely to be forgotten.


Source and further reading:
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S41/88/27A90/index.xml?section=featured

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