New Map of Meaning in the Brain Changes Ideas About Memory

 New Map of Meaning in the Brain Changes Ideas About Memory from Quanta:

“A lot of people have this intuitive idea that the perceptual experience is like a roaring flame, and the memory experience is like a flickering candle,” said Brice Kuhl, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon. But memories clearly aren’t just a weaker echo of the original experience. The physical shifts seen in these recent experiments instead suggest that systematic changes in the representations themselves encode an experience that is entirely distinct but still tethered to the original.

Huth’s work provides new insights into the nature of that transformation. Perhaps memory isn’t as visually driven as we thought. Maybe it’s more abstract, more semantic, more linguistic. “We often have this impression that we have these fantastic visual representations of things,” Baker said. “You feel like you can see it. But maybe you can’t.”