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. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
The brain places those pieces onto the scaffolds of event scripts. “It’s all a construction,” (View Highlight)
“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.” (View Highlight)