What Makes a Memory Come Alive? – with Jon Simons

What can neuroscience tell us about the subjective experience of remembering, the feeling of reliving a memory? Cognitive neuroscientist Jon Simons considers the latest evidence.
Subscribe for regular science videos: http://bit.ly/RiSubscRibe

Watch the Q&A here: https://youtu.be/QPuOr6_4GhA

The ability to remember personally experienced events in vivid, multisensory detail makes an immensely important contribution to our lives, allowing us to re-live each moment of a previous encounter and providing us with the store of precious memories that form the building blocks of who we are. Such remembering involves reactivating sensory and perceptual features of an event, and the thoughts and feelings we had when the event occurred, integrating them into a conscious first-person experience. It allows us to make judgments about the things we remember, such as distinguishing events that actually occurred from those we might have imagined or been told about. Although a great deal is known about the cognitive and neural processes that enable us to recall a word list, for example, considerably less is known about the processes underlying the subjective experience of remembering.

Jon Simons is a reader in Cognitive Neuroscience at Cambridge University. His research investigates the role of brain regions such as the frontal, medial temporal, and parietal lobes in human memory.

His research in the laboratory uses a number of methods, including behavioural studies, functional neuroimaging (fMRI), electrophysiology (EEG/MEG), and brain stimulation (TMS/tDCS).

This talk and Q&A were filmed at the Ri on 23 March 2018.

The Ri is on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ri_science
and Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/royalinstitution
and Tumblr: http://ri-science.tumblr.com/
Our editorial policy: http://www.rigb.org/home/editorial-policy
Subscribe for the latest science videos: http://bit.ly/RiNewsletter