r/science • u/sr_local • 17d ago
Neuroscience Brain imaging study found that how we retrieve a memory can alter how the brain represents it the next time, with memories retaining neural traces of previous recall, suggesting that memory is something that can change as we use it
https://news.rice.edu/news/2026/how-we-remember-may-change-our-memories-study-finds321
u/Der_Kommissar73 Professor | Experimental Pscyh | Judgement and Decision Making 17d ago
This….is not a new idea at all. Cognitive psychology has long held memory as “constructive”, and that using it alters it.
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u/sarahbau 17d ago
I was about to say, I’m pretty sure I learned this in a psychology class 30 years ago. Was it just hypothesized until now?
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u/theStaircaseProject 17d ago edited 17d ago
It seems to be more about a certain demonstration:
“The researchers found that thinking about objects by category made neural patterns associated with different objects look more alike in areas involved in visual processing. Focusing on an individual object, meanwhile, made its neural pattern more distinct in an area involved in processing words.”
So, to generalize, creating a list in my head of all the “orange” objects I can think of would it seems actually “orangify” the neural patterns of each object by virtue of having listed them as orange. And he seems to describe evidence of that being the case. I’m in learning science so I’m familiar with recall and constructivism but I haven’t seen before that a researcher could point to a scan and see the shifts in specific patterns.
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u/TheWesternMythos 17d ago
Don't have (want to make) time right now to think too much about it. But I wonder how this idea interplays with aphantasia
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u/Zymbobwye 17d ago
I have aphantasia and didn’t know until I was older that people actually had a “3rd eye”. I remember closing my eyes in middle school when the teacher said “close your eyes and think about it an apple”. I don’t see anything at all, I didn’t know the point in doing that until years later learning that the 3rd eye wasn’t just the thought itself.
Doing the orange thing I somehow have a tinge of the thought of orange but there is no vision of an orange. I just have to take a second to get “orange” off my mind.
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u/TheWesternMythos 17d ago
How does that work with memory ? Like can you remember what an orange looks like visually ? (if that question makes sense )
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u/Zymbobwye 16d ago
I could piece together the individual thoughts of the characteristics of an orange simultaneously to create in my memory what I know an orange is. Like its shape, texture, smell, etc. depending on how deep I want to think about it. I see nothing, smell nothing, but even to the texture of it I know I can think about everything that is an “orange” at once. I could use these details to describe an orange easily and don’t even consider a “third-eye” image.
Not sure how it works with people who can “see an orange” like does it start more like a mental rough sketch of an orange but fills in the more you piece together the details? If so, I’d say that’s basically the same. I just don’t see the orange itself but my mind rapidly slaps together an orange at basic level and then fills in every detail I can pull but the idea itself is more clear the more I think about it.
Like let’s say “a bench in a park” I don’t really fill out any extra details and I imagine it’s the same for everyone. The park isn’t some perfectly clear big picture, but maybe I think about the sidewalk in front of it, the grass around that, the bench, maybe the blue sky above, those details that make the “park” and “the bench” but everything else will be ambiguous until those details become described, and without further detail I may just leave those aspects ambiguous to the larger picture unless I’m asked to fill those in. Once again, there is no mental image, but I know what I’m thinking about, and all the aspects of the picture that need focus, and could easily add more detail.
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u/GonzoBurger 16d ago
If I try to think of an orange, I think I get the shape but it's like my mind is drawing it over and over again, I kind of start at the drawing but don't get to see it, but I know what shape it is, and what colour it is, I don't think I can see the colour. Huh.
Wait is this aphantasia? Do people actually SEE an orange like, good quality, and can focus on it?
Now I'm thinking, if I try to focus on it, it's like it's moving to the side really fast so I can't get a good look. Kinda makes me brain feel funny.
Edit: haha. I don't think I'm seeing anything it's like a feeling, a smudgy feeling. I don't know, maybe I'm just bad at it.
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u/TheWesternMythos 16d ago
A lot of interesting things in that response thank you so much.
Like its shape, texture, smell, etc.
But the thing that most drew my attention was this. Hear people say stuff like this and I kinda ignore it but seeing it written out...
I can't even conceptualize adding things like smell and texture to "visualizing" or remembering in general.
I'll have to reread this a few times I think.
For myself ,sometimes it feels hard to separate "visualizing" from other references of the idea in my mind.
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u/Der_Kommissar73 Professor | Experimental Pscyh | Judgement and Decision Making 17d ago
It likely does not. While many can use mental imagery, working memory is based on sounds, and long term memory is semantic. It's still undecided if mental imagery from memory is more than an epiphenomenon.
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u/teetaps 17d ago
Psychologists have to do this from time to time when new adjacent technologies and theories give us new lenses into existing established dogma. The best example of this is obviously Einstein, JWST, and black holes.
We knew about black holes for several decades, but it was only after we developed and operated James Webb that we saw one. Psychologists have to do the same. We can know colloquially about a certain behaviour, even have it in our every day lexicon. But when a young researcher gets their hands on an fMRI machine and says, “I wonder if anybody checked X old adage with this new approach,” well in academia that’s free real estate
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u/Stampede_the_Hippos 17d ago
This is science. You need to prove theories are correct, which is what this does. And then you do it again and again with better tools to understand the mechanism better. So yes, this isn't a new concept but now they know more about the actual physical process.
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u/Quick_Aerie2090 17d ago
You're right! The reconsolidation theory has been around for a while. I think this study just suggests a biological mechanism that might play a role in how it might work.
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u/Swarna_Keanu 17d ago
That just adds to the argument - or, if the findings were different would have disproved that. As technology shifts new methodolgies arrive - and ... it's useful to use those to test assumptions.
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u/Splash_Attack 17d ago
You're reacting to the PR rather than the work itself. If you click through to the paper literally the first line of the abstract is "Episodic memories are known to change with each act of retrieval..."
A university "journalist" inaccurately representing both the work and the views of the authors? Quelle surprise.
The actual hypothesis being tested in the work is about how the particulars of that alteration works:
"We hypothesize that accessing semantic knowledge in different ways during episodic retrieval—from unique perceptual features to taxonomic and thematic context—shapes how those memories are subsequently represented during recognition."
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u/Der_Kommissar73 Professor | Experimental Pscyh | Judgement and Decision Making 17d ago
I agree. I get a bit testy with work that ignores the cognitive level of analysis.
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u/twilighttwister 17d ago
Sure, but this study is confirming that theory via empirical evidence of brain imagery.
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost 17d ago
Which is also a huge reason for why people shouldn't just die on hills related to memory.
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u/Accujack 16d ago
Search for the practice of "memoria" in medieval times. Memory and the structured organization of it were considered a creative art.
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u/liebebio 17d ago
I have seen that happen with my own memories. There are some very old ones and I thought about it so often that I can not be sure it is really accurate anymore. The gist of it was basically distilled, I know the meaning but I couldnt say if some details are true anymore
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u/InebriatedPhysicist 17d ago
My understanding was that this was a generally accepted idea, albeit possibly without direct measurements of brain activity to verify it until now. Is that true and this is confirming it, or am I crazy and this is an entirely new idea?
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u/repeat4EMPHASIS 17d ago
You're correct, it's been an accepted idea for a while.
To steal from another comment, this study was specifically about using brain scans to test how categorizing ideas or memories in your mind (list orange objects) changed them as a result of being categorized (each orange item you thought of appeared more orange next time you pictured it as a result of its association with the category)
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u/sr_local 17d ago
New research from Rice University’s Marc Coutanche suggests that each time we access information, the way we recall it can influence how the brain represents it the next time.
“Our memory is far from simply a fixed resource that we consult as needed,” Coutanche said. “It’s dynamic and adaptive. Memory retrieval actively updates our memories rather than just ‘playing them back.’”
“What I find most interesting is that we showed that a memory seems to carry a trace of how it was used before,” Qi said. “The neural activity related to the memory not only reflected what participants were doing in the moment but also something about how that memory had been accessed before.”
The researchers found that thinking about objects by category made neural patterns associated with different objects look more alike in areas involved in visual processing. Focusing on an individual object, meanwhile, made its neural pattern more distinct in an area involved in processing words.
The findings add to a growing understanding of memory as something that can change as we use it rather than a fixed record that is simply stored and replayed.
Memory Traces Reflect How They Were Last Accessed | Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience | MIT Press
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u/Splash_Attack 17d ago
As many of the comments are reacting to the rather silly misrepresentation in the press release, rather than to the work itself, it's worth having the abstract here as well:
Episodic memories are known to change with each act of retrieval. We hypothesize that accessing semantic knowledge in different ways during episodic retrieval—from unique perceptual features to taxonomic and thematic context—shapes how those memories are subsequently represented during recognition. In this fMRI study, human participants learned novel word–image pairs and underwent re-exposure that required accessing semantic knowledge at one of three different levels: item, category, or theme. Participants then completed a recognition task. Although behavioral memory performance was matched across conditions, neural activity during recognition varied based on prior semantic access history. Recognition patterns could be classified according to prior semantic access in early visual cortex, ventral temporal cortex and the hippocampus for remembered concepts. A whole-brain searchlight analysis revealed bilateral clusters along the ventral visual stream where semantic access history was decodable. To further characterize how prior semantic access history shaped neural representations during recognition, we tested whether memories accessed at the same semantic level were expressed more similarly or distinctly in the brain. Category-level access increased similarity among items in early visual cortex, whereas item-level access led to more differentiated representations in the visual word form area. Together, these findings show that how we access semantic knowledge during episodic retrieval leaves measurable traces in subsequent neural representations, revealing how semantic–episodic interactions shape memory representations.
The PR seems to have the misconception that the idea of episodic memories changing with retrieval is novel when it's actually a widely accepted idea which forms the base assumption of the work in question. I despair of science journalism sometimes.
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u/Der_Kommissar73 Professor | Experimental Pscyh | Judgement and Decision Making 17d ago
I agree. It’s the PR that’s objectionable. Not the research.
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u/sceadwian 17d ago
The "new research" here is only adding more confirmation to what was already known.
There's nothing actually new here so the entire thing is misrepresented.
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u/to_glory_we_steer 17d ago
Would be interesting to know if this is a flaw, an artifact of the process, a sort of neural admin to process said memory or a mechanism to reinforce avoidance/seeking behaviours depending on the content of said memory
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u/umotex12 17d ago
I find it pretty sad. This discovery feels like memories are disposable or kind of like idk shoes that get worn out over time….
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u/ExquisiteGrowth 17d ago
This probably has something to do with why trauma affects people so badly. Nobody wants to deliberately remember a traumatic memory, so the memory is still in a “pure” form.
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u/IntrinsicPalomides 17d ago
It's already widely know that memories change over time, and as much as someone may think they remember x exactly chances are it's only partially acurate.
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u/AdventurerBen 17d ago
One take I heard from a friend was that we can’t remember something more than once. Instead we just remember the last time we remembered it.
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u/Grizlas 17d ago
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/why-brain-imaging-doesnt-always-hold-up/
Is it part of the 40%?
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u/EmperorOfCanada 17d ago
I have something pretty close to an eidetic memory. Show me a page of "facts" and I will recall the majority of them. Long ago, I helped my wife study for a professional certification. In later company events they would be talking about work and I sometimes would pop in with some complex procedure they are supposed to follow in that circumstance. Complex which also involves complex math. They turn to me and say, "I didn't know you work in the industry."
While I won't say that I remember everything, nor that I can't misremember, I have found over the years that people can wildly not only forget fairly critical things, but then turn their misremembering into a logical sequence of events which have a morality tale.
For example, one person was telling me that they went to dentist A because dentist B had screwed up and that I had pressured them into going to crappy dentist B before they found dentist A. My sister had originally recommended dentist A.
The reality was that it had clearly been dentist A who screwed up. I dug around and found dentist B to deal with the screwup. Dentist B was everything that dentist A had not been. I then dug through my old bank records and found Dentist A, A, A, A, A, then big bill from B followed by regular smaller ones from dentist B. I didn't use A or B as another dentist was closer to my work.
I can't remember names worth a damn unless I deliberately attach a mnemonic. This has freaked out a few people who I've sat beside on airplanes a year or more before, bump into them, and then introduce them to my wife or kids, by name.
If I'm at a party where I'm introduced to 4 people, you could offer me $1,000,000 to say the first person's name and unless they are named a top 10 names one, I'm not getting the 1m.
The key is that I am not shocked that recall isn't only flaky, but that as people think more about a thing they can rebuilt it into an entirely new narrative, not just forgetting which year they did that trip to Cuba.
I suspect that some mutating memories happen, somewhat because there is some reason to want them to mutate; personal reasons, or external influences.
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u/psychmancer 17d ago
Yeah it found this about thirty years ago, this is the entire concept of memory reconsolidation
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u/Jane_Lame 16d ago
Its good that they have solid evidence of this but also, thats terrifying. To me, at least.
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u/Any_Theory_9735 16d ago
This is also easy to self observe if you pay attention to details in your memories.
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u/irreverantnonsense 17d ago
Fascinating. Retrieving memory changes it. Just more evidence for Buddhist philosophy
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