Are Forgotten Memories Still In Your Brain?

For anyone who’s ever forgotten something or someone they wish they could remember, a bit of solace: Though the memory is hidden from your conscious mind, it might not be gone.

In a study of college students, brain imaging detected patterns of activation that corresponded to memories the students thought they’d lost.

“Even though your brain still holds this information, you might not always have access to it,” said neurobiologist Jeffrey Johnson of the University of California, Irvine. His remarks appeared in the study he co-authored, published Wednesday in Neuron.

That recalling a memory triggers the neurological patterns encoded when the memory was formed is a tenet of cognitive science. Less understood, however, is what becomes of those patterns at moments of incomplete recall.

Maybe you remember breakfast at a certain restaurant, but not what you ate; perhaps you recall a particular conversation, but not what you said. It’s not known whether those details vanish from the mind altogether, or are subsumed by some larger pattern, or remain intact but inaccessible.

It wasn’t quite clear what happens to them,” said Johnson of lost details. “But even when people claim that there are no details attached to their memories, we could still pick some of those details out.

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