New research suggests, “mental time travel” can be used to revive half-forgotten memories.
A study published on Monday (July 28) in the Journal PNAS showed that recalling the feelings and thoughts that occurred when they first saved the memory can rejuvenate the decaying memories. In fact, researchers have discovered that renovated memories are almost as resilient as newly formed memories.
This study focused specifically on the memory of learned information, as opposed to memory of events, for example. As we learn something, those new memories wobble in forgotten curves, like rocks perched on a tall mountain. When that boulder rolls downhill, memory details are lost. However, as it approaches the base of the memory mountain, which is not inclined, the speed of forgetting slows.
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There is a process that “my memories become increasingly stable and less sensitive to all kinds of forgetting processes,” says Karl Heinz Beumul, a psychologist at the University of Regensberg in Germany. Some details remain etched in your memory, while others disappear over time. However, this forgetting may be inevitable, Beumur argued.
It means “If you mentally go back in time and return to the encoding context, you can reduce this type of forgetting.” In a new study, Bäuml and colleagues investigated how this mental time travel influenced memory acquisition.
The team recruited over 1,200 volunteers. Half of them were tasked with studying short passages, while the other half studied a list of unrelated nouns. Each group was then divided into four subgroups and asked to remember the material in various ways.
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One group, acting as a comparison point, was asked to remember information they had just learned several times over the next hour without performing any additional steps. The other three groups had a 4-hour, 24-hour, or 7-day gap between learning the material and testing memory.
Once tested, these three groups were asked to time travel mentally as a kind of introductory book that reminded them of thoughts and feelings they had thought during their first session in the lab, look at a subset of the information they had learned, and remember the rest. The comparison group was also retested at these later points, and its recall, time travel, was used as a benchmark.
Both types of mental time travel restored participants’ flashbacks and shook their memories to some extent. With the 4 and 24 hour marks, these tricks improved the recall by “reactivating” memory. Remembering emotions from previous encoding restored approximately 70% of target memory after 59% after 24 hours, while selective priming recovered approximately 84% and 68% of target memory at these time points.
However, a week later, the effects of mental time travel had faded. Remembering emotions did not recover memories, but priming recovered only 31% of the target memory.
Deniz Vatansever, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Hudan in China, said he was not involved in the study. “Memory doesn’t just collapse linearly, but in reality it can almost reset to its original shape,” he said. However, he said the actual test is to see how these findings live outside the lab.
“The autobiographical memories and other experiences we have in our daily lives — they are rich in emotional content. They are rich in sensory modalities,” he pointed out. By comparison, memory of short passages and word lists lacks these features.
Bauml agreed that the degree of memory differs depending on factors not investigated in the current study, such as the richness of experiences being remembered. For now, however, he said the evidence suggests that if you are aiming to promote the exam, it may be best to schedule a revision session with only a short interval between them.
“The best way is to distribute your mental recovery a little and do it for three days, six days, etc.” he said. This “creates a repetitive cycle of rejuvenation and keeps all memories at a higher level,” he suggested.
The study found that a single instance of mental time travel could bring memories back to the mountain, but other studies suggest that repetitive practices can make it difficult to roll memories first, said Justin Halbert, a neuroscientist at Bates University, was not involved in the study.
This may mean that memory needs to be refreshed regularly first, but after an hour or two, the subsequent refresh could be long and possibly months or years to wait, Halbert said. “That may mean you have to push the rocks up the mountain several times to maintain that memory for a long time,” he said.
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