Memories for things forgotten

Here is an article from Wired about using brain scanning techniques to show that things that people can’t recall may still be stored in the brain. In this study the researchers from UC Irvine had students try to remember a list of words and found that, for those words the students could not remember, the brain activity was the same as those words they could remember. This indicates that the memories are there, just not accessible.

Back in graduate school I did similar research, without the brain scanning. We also gave people things to remember and then probed them for partial information when they could not recall during a test. A classic phenomenon is a “feeling of knowing” in which a person will state that they know the information being asked, and might even be able to tell you a bit about it (e.g., “the word begins with b”), but they just can’t remember it now. We also used different kinds of memory tests, such as word-completion tasks, to show that partial memories were intact when there appeared to be forgetting.

Lupker, S.J., Harbluk, J.L., & Patrick, A.S. (1991). Memory for things forgotten. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 17, 897-907.

Forgotten Memories Are Still in Your Brain

For anyone who’s ever forgotten something or someone they wish they could remember, a bit of solace: Though the memory is hidden from your conscious mind, it might not be gone.

In a study of college students, brain imaging detected patterns of activation that corresponded to memories the students thought they’d lost.