Past Experiences Helps Human Brain Understand Present Experiences

Researchers at University of
Oxford, UCL and Deepmind have found that past experiences can play a vital role
in understanding and determining our approach to new experiences.
It is thought that making these
inferences relies on the models of the world that we create in our mind during
everyday experiences, which use the same neural mechanisms (and brain cells)
that help us understand our position relative to other objects and places.
Although predominantly encoding
our current location, these brain cells also spontaneously recall old memories,
and explore new possibilities – a phenomenon known as “replay”.
The researchers trained
participants in a task defining an ordering of everyday objects, and then
presented a new set of familiar objects in a scrambled order - during which
they applied MEG neuroimaging to map brain activity in the participants.
They observed that
representations of the new objects were reactivated during subsequent rest.
These 'replay' events occurred much faster than in their actual experience.
Human replay occurs while the
brain is resting between exercises, and reverses direction after a reward has
been given for making the correct choice.
They also showed that human
replay spontaneously reorganises experience based on learnt structure. This
enables us to spontaneously re-order sequences to integrate past knowledge with
current experiences.
Professor Timothy Behrens of
Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, who was involved in the
research, said: ‘Replay plays out events in a different order to the order they
were seen in, which is a sophisticated jump for the brain to make.
‘A defining feature of human
intelligence is the ability to make strong inferences on the basis of sparse
observations. If you notice your husband’s wallet on the kitchen table, you
immediately know he is more likely to be in the garden than the pub. It is
completely unknown how such inferences are performed in our brains, but our
research suggests an important role for replay.
For more details:
http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-07-04-human-brains-reorganise-experiences-while-resting-find-new-solutions
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