The Places We Make Memories Help Us Inscribe Them
hubie writes:
It's obvious to most people as soon as they set foot in a place they know well-like their childhood bedroom or a former classroom-that place and memory are intimately linked.
A new paper by researchers at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins, and Princeton sheds light on that phenomenon, and helps demonstrate the neural mechanisms behind it. The research paves the way for a better understanding of how new memories can build on top of existing knowledge and what causes us to remember-or forget-events in our lives.
[...] They found that when participants are in a location they know well, they form stronger memories. The findings suggest that very familiar places create deeper and richer memories for the events that happen there, perhaps because we have such detailed knowledge of that space and can connect new events to the details we already know.
"Spilling a pitcher of water in your own kitchen and soaking your grandmother's tea cozy, your son's refrigerator drawing, and your Pomeranian creates a host of personally meaningful elements that lead to a more complex and durable memory," Baldassano said.
The research team created a digital "memory palace," a virtual reality building with 23 rooms. To make sure that each room would cause patterns of brain activity that were as different as possible, the rooms had varying shapes, sizes, decorations, and background music, such as a giant dome with floating rocks or a small room with a campfire.
[...] The researchers found that people were better at remembering objects that had been placed in the rooms with more stable and clear patterns of brain activity. In other words, when people had built a strong, high quality mental map for a room, the room was more useful for encoding a new memory.
"It's a bit like assessing the sturdiness of a new foundation," Masis-Obando said. "We come in, take a few measures, and get a sense of how strong that foundation is. If you want new memories to hang steadily, they need something solid to anchor to." The findings also suggest that the more distinct a neural impression a specific location has made on us, the more it helps us inscribe memories.
[...] This work provides an explanation for a popular memorization technique called the Method of Loci, in which people first carefully study a sequence of familiar locations. When they want to remember new information like a shopping list or the names of people at a party, they imagine walking through these familiar locations and attaching information to each one. This trick allows them to get all the advantages of creating memories in a well-learned map, but without having to actually visit the location (or experience it in virtual reality).
"These findings are very exciting both for our understanding of memories, and for understanding how spatial knowledge-like mental maps-can help us learn information," Baldassano said.
Journal Reference: Masis-Obando, R., Norman, K.A. & Baldassano, C. Spatial contexts with reliable neural representations support reinstatement of subsequently placed objects. Nat Hum Behav (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02379-z
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