How the brain remembers panoramic views

If you try to remember the house or apartment in which you spent your childhood, then it will be easy for you to remember not only the house in which you lived, but also the neighboring houses, a playground, buildings on the other side of the street. Neuroscientists from the Massachusetts University of Technology have found areas in the brain that are involved in the formation of such memories.

These parts of the brain help us to create a complete 360 ​​° panorama of the smallest memories of a particular place.
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“Most of our ideas about what surrounds us are shaped in our memory from what we have seen,” says Caroline Robertson, Ph.D., at the McGovern Brain Research Laboratory at MIT, and a junior researcher at the Harvard Fellows Society. “We were looking for centers in the brain in which the integration of memories into a general panoramic picture takes place.” Caroline Robertson is the main author of the article, which was published on September 8 in the journal Current Biology. Continuation under the cat ...

MIT scientists have suggested that 360 ° panoramas of familiar places stored in our memory are “glued together” from individual images that enter the brain from the retina. And that for this process are jointly responsible three areas of the brain: the occipital area of ​​the places (OPA), the parahippocampal area of ​​the places (PPA) and the retrosplenial segment of the limbic cortex (RSC). To test this hypothesis, researchers set up a series of experiments over a group of volunteers, using a virtual reality helmet, measuring the activity of different parts of their brain.

In the first series of experiments, one half of the people were shown one 100-degree piece of a 360-degree panorama of one of the streets of Boston, and the second half - two narrower pieces of the same panorama, not adjacent to each other. After that, they were shown 40 pairs of images and asked if they were taken from the same section of the street. Those of the subjects who saw a large single piece of the panorama, coped much better.

In the second series of experiments, people were asked to determine whether there was a certain section of the street to the right or left of them (virtually, of course) when they saw it. At the same time, in half of the cases, they were shown an image of another section of the same street before, and in the other half, a view of another street. In the first case, people often answered correctly.

Thus, 360-degree panoramas of the environment are really glued together by the brain from separate images, and different such pieces of the same panorama in memory are inextricably linked with each other. Moreover, as shown by the analysis of the activity of different parts of the brain, are activated with such interrelated memorization of OPA and PSC, but not PPA.

“After you saw a series of sections of the panoramic view, you clearly link them in memory with a familiar place,” Robertson concluded. “It also causes overlapping visual representations in certain parts of the brain, implicitly defining your future perceptual experience.”

The last phrase will become clearer if you know that when we are in a familiar place, our brain largely “draws” the environment from memory, while in fact we directly see only a narrow portion of the environment — something like the first series of experiments from MIT.

Source: news.mit.edu