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[!summary]Neuroscientists discovered that our memories are structured by “event scripts,” which are mental templates for common experiences, like weddings or airport trips. These scripts help us connect new experiences to past knowledge, influencing what details we remember. Recent research shows that our brains can select which script to use when recalling an event, affecting our memory of it.
Highlights
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He believes that the brain builds a rich library of scripts for expected scenarios — restaurant or airport, business deal or marriage proposal — over a person’s lifetime. These standardized scripts, and departures from them, influence how and how well we remember specific instances of these event types, his lab has found.
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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.
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The brain places those pieces onto the scaffolds of event scripts. “It’s all a construction,”
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“It’s not like you have this video camera of exactly what happened, exactly as it happened. You have to reconstruct, based on pieces of the experience, what you think happened.”