The Science Of 'Mental Time Travel' May Help Unlock The Human Mind
A new study could offer some hope for reinstating and rejuvenating old memories. The idea builds off a theory based around "mental time travel," which suggests mentally traveling back to the time of a memory can revive the details of the memory and essentially reset the forgetting curve.
It's an interesting hypothesis that could offer more insight into how our brains work, even while wandering aimlessly, as well as how our memories hold up long-term. As many of us are probably already aware, as more time passes since a memory, it becomes more difficult to recall the finer details. This is especially evident if you try to recall something that happened when you were a child.
To test whether mentally time traveling could indeed rejuvenate a memory, researchers recruited over 1,200 participants for a new study, which they published the findings for in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They then split the participants into four different groups, where each group underwent a series of experiments.
For the first experiment, the researchers tasked the groups with memorizing a list of words. Then, for a second experiment, they were asked to read a passage from a book. After the initial reading and memorizing was done, the researchers then asked the groups to recall the material that they had read and learned.
