Memory Lane

Some experiences are hard to forget, like perhaps your first kiss.

But how does a person hold onto these personal movies?

Using brain-imaging techniques, scientists are unraveling the mechanism responsible for creating and storing memories.

They are finding that the hippocampus, within the brain's gray matter, could act as a memory box.

But this storage area isn't so discriminatory. It turns out that both true and false memories activate similar brain regions.

To pull out the real memory, some researchers ask a subject to recall the memory in context, something that's much more difficult when the event didn't actually occur

/Live Science