Storytelling Methods Alter How Memories Are Stored in the Brain, Neuroscientists Find

The brain remembers stories differently depending on how they were told.

TO Allison Parshall edited by Sarah Levin Fraser

Tell me what you had for dinner last night.

There are different ways you can fill in the details of this story. you could give perceptual descriptions about how your food looked and tasted. Or you could focus more on conceptual experiences, such as what the food made you think and feel. In a new brain scanning study, neuroscientists find they tell the same story. activates different memory mechanisms in the listener's brain in different waysdetermining how someone remembers what you told them.

The results do not indicate that any form storytelling– conceptual or perceptual – necessarily easier to remember than the other; Participants in the new study recalled stories told in these two ways about equally. But the results show that they are different storytelling techniques may change the way this information is stored and retrieved, perhaps explaining why some people are better at remembering stories with certain types of information compared to others.

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“There will be people with more perceptual memory, and other people with more conceptual memory,” says senior author Signy Sheldon, a psychologist who studies memory at McGill University. The results were published in JNeurosci on Monday and will be presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference next month.

Memories are not stored in one place in the brain. Instead, traces of memory distributed across networks in the outer layers of the brain. These networks connect to a deep brain structure called hippocampus, which helps form, index and retrieve memories.

When forming memories, the hippocampus tends to interact with some of these brain networks more than others. Sheldon and her colleagues wanted to test whether stories about the same events, told with different details, would activate different hippocampal networks. They recruited 35 participants to listen to three mundane stories while under a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. Each story – about grocery shopping, going to the airport, or going to a restaurant with a friend – had two different versions, in which either conceptual or perceptual details were replaced by the same overall narrative.

For example, in one version of the restaurant story, the narrator says, “Some time later, the waiter finally brought us our food. I remember thinking to myself how good the pasta was. Looking back, I'm not sure whether it was because I was starving or because the food actually tasted so good.” In another, they say: “Some time later, the waiter finally brought us our food. I remember the two-foot-long pepper grinder the waiter used to season our dishes. My spaghetti noodles were wrapped around the three meatballs on my plate. It looked really good.” After participants heard and mentally recalled the stories in the scanner, they were asked to retell them to the researchers.

When participants recalled stories they had heard with conceptual details in the scanner, their hippocampi activated, along with parts of a brain network called default mode networkor DMN, which is active when processing information about yourself, your emotions and more. In contrast, when people recalled difficult stories, the hippocampus was activated along with brain networks outside the DMN, including the left angular gyrus. This area of ​​the brain is known to be active when recalling memories containing details of various senses.

“I think it's about what I expected,” says Hongmi Lee, a cognitive psychologist who studies memory at Purdue University who was not involved in the new study. The DMN processes high-level abstract information, so it makes sense that it would be involved in storing and retrieving a story containing a lot of conceptual detail.

Although participants remembered both types of stories equally well in the short term, they tended to prefer conceptual stories to perceptual ones and were more confident in their memories of them. “These conceptual details often make up a really big part of what people remember from history,” says Chris Baldassano, a psychologist who studies memory at Columbia University, who also was not involved in the new study. “If you watch a movie, you might remember some of the perceptual details, especially if there's some really striking imagery. But a lot of the real underlying story is the conceptual stuff that's going on: the social interactions, the characters, your emotions.”

The preference for conceptual memories may be particularly relevant as people get older. Research shows that as people age, they remember more conceptual details than perceptual ones, moving from vivid, event-specific sensory details to memories that “get the essence“of what happened. This may be a result of age-related changes in the brain that make it harder to store and retrieve these lower-level perceptual details,” Sheldon suggests, “but it may also be a simple product of having lived more of life. When we are young, “everything is really new. We'll pay attention to everything,” Sheldon says. “But as we get older, we use memories more for social connections and often remember and describe things with which we are more familiar.”

If you want someone to remember the story you tell, any detail can help, especially if it's relevant and unique. “We know that this helps create memories that are easier to access later,” Baldassano says. “It gives you more potential hooks to help you find that memory later if there's a lot of detail attached to it.”

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