These standardized scripts, and departures from them, influence how and how well we remember specific instances of these event types, his lab has found. And recently, in a paper published in Current Biology in fall 2024, they showed that individuals can select a dominant script (opens a new tab) for a complex, real-world event — for example, while watching a marriage proposal in a restaurant, we might opt, subconsciously, for either a proposal or a restaurant script — which determines what details we remember.
The analyses have generated a new understanding of how the human brain constructs narrative memories. Nearly the entire brain is involved, contradicting earlier ideas that placed memory in specific brain regions. And memories are built in temporal pieces, each of which ranges from a second to a minute in length.
Chen and her colleagues were able to match brain activity recorded during participants’ recollections to specific scenes around 60 seconds long — for example, when Sherlock meets Watson. Recalling a scene evoked similar brain activity to watching it, and those patterns were largely shared across subjects, suggesting that different people committed the same experiences to memory in the same way.
The results also meant that movies could be used to unlock a universal human code for recording experiences. But that code has many layers, and it would take a computer scientist with an interest in the brain to start peeling them back.
“With Baldassano’s method, you could take that continuous brain data as people are watching a movie and look for where there are sudden changes in spatial activity patterns — and that matched what people would say were the boundaries in a movie,” Chen said. “It was a data-driven way of segmenting experience.” Instead of memory being a province of the hippocampus along with a few other regions, as is commonly believed, Baldassano’s research suggested that memory formation involves collaboration among many brain regions.Across all restaurant clips, one pattern showed up when actors entered, which shifted to another when they were seated, yet again when they ordered food, and once more when the food arrived. All restaurant stories shared these four event patterns on average, with some story-unique differences added on top. The airport movies were similarly represented in the brain, with each step of the sequence characterized by a predictable cross-brain fingerprint centralized in the prefrontal cortex. much if not most of the brain’s reaction to an event or story originates in memories of how that type of event usually plays out. In other words, we process the present through the past.Because they’ve played many games, chess masters recognize patterns where others are overwhelmed by detail. Similarly, when you meet friends at a restaurant, you know the server will come to take your food order; because you are not baffled by the basic sequence of events, you’re better able to remember flavors, details of your conversations, the person at the next table.
In other words, having scripts bolsters memory. “It’s so much easier to remember things if they slot into what you already know about the world,”
nd it suggests that people have some power over what they remember. “It’s not purely the stimulus activating these things,” Baldassano said. “You have some volitional control over how you choose to categorize the information that’s coming in.” That is, your preconceptions and goals shape your experiences and what you remember about them. It may be possible to adopt a mindset that predisposes you to remember particular details of an event. “It’s 100% just schema instruction,” he said. The world can be bewildering to children because they lack the mental scaffolds to make sense of what is happening. Books and other media help write the scripts, at the neurobiological level, that will help his kids navigate the rest of their lives.— Read on www.quantamagazine.org/how-event-scripts-structure-our-personal-memories-20250221/
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