Imagine that you witnessed a gruesome crime or a terrible accident. The police identify you as a witness to the act and you are taken in for interrogation. You try to piece together the events that happened in a somewhat chronological manner. But, unless you have an eidetic memory, you won't necessarily remember all the tiny details of what happened. Instead, you associate certain sensory perceptions and experiences to the memories of the event. But how does the brain actually do that, you wonder? Well, that was the topic of Mark Howard, a cognitive neuroscientist, and his postdoctoral student, Karthik Shankar. They wanted to figure out how the brain plots the points of the past on a timeline. This is what they came up with.
(Image credit: Ashley Mackenzie/Quanta Mag)
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