Why do we remember some moments in life and not others?

There is memories that fade like a dream when you wake up, while others remain intact in memoryclear even with the passing of the years. Why does our brain choose to save certain moments in great detail? and relegate others to a blurry corner?

A new study from Boston University (United States) has a possible answer to why we have memories rich in details and others as faded sketches. The work, published in ‘Science Advances’ suggests that Memories of everyday moments gain greater strength if they are connected to a significant event: something surprising, rewarding, or with great emotional impact.

The findings could lead to best treatments for people with memory problems or even help students retain complex concepts. “Memory is not just a passive recording device: our brain decides what mattersand emotional events can go back in time to stabilize fragile memories,” says Robert MG Reinhart, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Emotional events stay in our memory

“Develop Strategies to strengthen useful memories or weakening harmful ones is a long-standing goal in cognitive neuroscience. Our study suggests that emotional relevance could be exploited in precise ways to achieve those objectives,” the experts explain. Although most of us know that lhe special moments occupy a privileged place in our memoryresearchers have shown disagreement regarding the concepts known as retroactive and proactive improvement memory: the prioritization of memories immediately before or after an important or relevant event. Besides, Previous studies have disagreed on whether weaker memories stabilize or become easier to remember. by linking them to a more prominent one.

Reinhart says the latest project, which included about 650 participants, ten individual studies and the use of artificial intelligence to analyze a broader set of data, it is the first to definitively prove that memory improves. One important difference from previous studies: they found that the brain uses a sliding scale to decide which memories to preserve.

Differences between proactive and retroactive memories

Many of the team’s experiments consisted of show participants dozens of imagesassociated with different levels of reward, and then subject them to a surprise memory test the next day. In the case of the events after an event (proactive memories)the intensity of the memory seemed depend on the emotional impact of the crucial moment: The more enduring the most relevant event was, the more likely it was to remember everything that followed.

This did not apply to remembering the previous events (retroactive memories). They were more likely to consolidate if they had similarities (perhaps a visual cue, such as a matching color) that connected them to the crucial event. According to Reinhart, this is the first validation in humans of the “Gradual prioritization, a new principle of how the brain consolidates everyday experiences”.

The researchers also found that, if any secondary memory had emotional weight in itself, the memory-enhancing effect was reduced. “The brain seems prioritize fragile memories that would otherwise be lost,” says Reinhart, who has published a series of highly cited articles on how memory works.

Although the last study focused on discover a basic mechanism that guides how memories are encodedReinhart says the work could lay the foundation for future studies and clinical interventions and other types in the real world. “The discovery has broad implications for both theory and practice,” says Reinhart. “In education, combining emotionally engaging material with fragile concepts could improve retention. In the clinical setting, we could rescue weak memories, very hidden in our minds due to normal aging, for example. You can also Reversing the situation for people with trauma-related disorders; perhaps you don’t want to rescue a distressing memory,” concludes the researcher.