Memory

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences.

New experiments reveal how the brain chooses which memories to save and add credence to advice about the importance of rest.

New research in social bats raises the intriguing possibility that evolution can reprogram the brain’s “place cells,” which are typically associated with location, to encode all kinds of environmental information.

New research finds that the memories useful for future generalizations are held in the brain separately from those recording unusual events.

The reshuffling of neurons during fruit fly metamorphosis suggests that larval memories don’t persist in adults.

Memories may affect how well the brain will learn about future events by shifting our perceptions of the world.

The neural representations of a perceived image and the memory of it are almost the same. New work shows how and why they are different.

When the brain encodes memories as positive or negative, one molecule determines which way they will go.

Dreams are subjective, but there are ways to peer into the minds of people while they are dreaming. Steven Strogatz speaks with sleep researcher Antonio Zadra about how new experimental methods have changed our understanding of dreams.