Current Biology: Brain stimulation improves memory of time and space travel

You may remember eating cereal for breakfast and forgetting the color of the bowl.
or recall watching your partner put the milk on, but can't remember which shelf to put it on.
scenario memory involves restoring the distribution patterns of brain activity that occurred when the event was first experienced.
is thought to coordinate recovery through interactions with networks of brain regions, but this hypothesis has not yet been tested for cause and effect in humans.
a new study by Northwestern Medicine, supported by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, improves memory of complex, real-world events like these by applying transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to brain networks responsible for memory.
study was published in Current Biology on February 4.
Enhanced reinstatement of naturalistic event memories due to hippocampal-network-targeted stimulation. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.027 The most typical practice in laboratory tests analyzing memory is that researchers cannot show study participants a list of pictures or words, but simply watch videos of daily activities, such as stacking clothes or taking out trash, to measure how memory works in everyday tasks.
study, researchers used TMS to alter brain activity and memory of real-world events.
stimulation, the subjects performed memory tasks and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
stimulation, the study participants answered questions about the content of the video clip more accurately, such as identifying a tree in the color of the shirt worn by the actor or in the background.
study authors used a brain imaging technique called "multi-voxel pattern analysis" to compare the brain activity patterns of the subjects when they watched the video with the brain activity when the subjects remembered the same video.
scientists measured the effect of stimulation by comparing the same measures that stimulate memory and brain activity after the memory network is stimulated as after stimulating the control brain region that is not part of the memory network.
the memory test, the subjects watched a large set of video clips, then remembered them and answered questions about whether the video content was true or false.
researchers found that memory network stimulation increased the number of subjects answering questions correctly.
it also increases the recovery of video in areas of the brain associated with visual processing.
hippocampal-network-targeted,HNT study has shown that measuring and manipulating realistic types of memories is possible, and that brain stimulation enables higher quality memory recovery in the brain.
is when the brain replays or reproduces an original event, and after stimulation, a person's brain activity while watching a video is closer to that of their brain as they remember the same video.
'On a daily basis, we have to remember complex events that involve many elements, such as different locations, people and objects,' said lead study author Melissa Hebscher, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.
, however, these methods can eventually be used to improve the memory of individuals with memory impairments due to brain damage or neurological disorders.
"That's why memory sometimes feels like 'psychological time travel,'" Hebscher said.
findings are significant for developing safe and effective ways to improve memory in the real world.
also said that follow-up studies will focus on collecting more reliable measurements of the memory-responsible brain network in healthy subjects and people with memory impairments, and that more reliable measurements of the network will help us more easily recognize recovery in the brain and may help improve the effectiveness of stimulation in enhancing memory.
in summary, the results of this study show that the non-invasional stimulation of functionally connected regions can change the large-scale pattern of event-specific activities beyond the stimulus area, thus enhancing the memory of complex natural events and their space-time environment.
provides important direct evidence to support the causal role of the hema network in memory recovery.
and previous findings of changes in seizure memory and neural activity after network-targeted stimulation, current research supports HNT's ability to stimulate the altered hippoctic cortitline network, which is important for the natural expression of plot memory, which can be used to treat memory disorders in life events.