{"id":397,"date":"2025-08-08T05:48:31","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T05:48:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/08\/08\/how-event-scripts-structure-our-personal-memories-quanta-magazine\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T06:41:35","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T06:41:35","slug":"how-event-scripts-structure-our-personal-memories-quanta-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/08\/08\/how-event-scripts-structure-our-personal-memories-quanta-magazine\/","title":{"rendered":"How \u2018Event Scripts\u2019 Structure Our Personal Memories | Quanta Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u2014 for example, while watching a marriage proposal in a restaurant, we might opt, subconsciously, for either a proposal or a restaurant script \u2014 which determines what details we remember.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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.<\/span><\/p>\n
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Chen and her colleagues were able to match brain activity recorded during participants\u2019 recollections to specific scenes around 60 seconds long \u2014 for example, when Sherlock meets Watson. Recalling a scene <\/span>evoked similar brain activity(opens a new tab)<\/span><\/a> <\/span>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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/head>\u201cWith Baldassano\u2019s 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 \u2014 and that matched what people would say were the boundaries in a movie,\u201d Chen said. \u201cIt was a data-driven way of segmenting experience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/head>Instead of memory being a province of the hippocampus along with a few other regions, as is commonly believed, Baldassano\u2019s research suggested that memory formation involves collaboration among many brain regions.<\/span>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.<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/head>much if not most of the brain\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n
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Because they\u2019ve 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\u2019re better able to remember flavors, details of your conversations, the person at the next table.<\/p>\n
In other words, having scripts bolsters memory. \u201cIt\u2019s so much easier to remember things if they slot into what you already know about the world,\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/head>nd it suggests that people have some power over what they remember. \u201cIt\u2019s not purely the stimulus activating these things,\u201d Baldassano said. \u201cYou have some volitional control over how you choose to categorize the information that\u2019s coming in.\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/head>\u201cIt\u2019s 100% just schema instruction,\u201d 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.<\/span> <\/span><\/span>
\n\u2014 Read on www.quantamagazine.org\/how-event-scripts-structure-our-personal-memories-20250221\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":399,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397\/revisions\/399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}