When we remember a past event, the human brain reconstructs that experience in reverse order, according to a new study at the University of Birmingham. when retrieving information about a visual object, the brain focuses first on the core meaning — recovering the ‘gist’ — and only afterwards recalls more specific details.
This is in sharp contrast to how the brain processes images when it first encounters them. When we initially see a complex object, it’s the visual details — patterns and colours — that we perceive first. Abstract, meaningful information that tells us the nature of the object we’re looking at, whether it’s a dog, a guitar, or a cup, for example, comes later.
our memories are not exact replicas of the things we originally experienced. Memory is a reconstructive process, biased by personal knowledge and world views — sometimes we even remember events that never actually happened.
Although our memories seem to appear in our ‘internal eye’ as vivid images, they are not simple snapshots from the past, but reconstructed and biased representations.
— source birmingham.ac.uk | Jan 14, 2019