KOSMOS Public Lecture: Moshe Bar (Bar-Ilan)
Public lecture as part of KOSMOS Summer University (internal link) Abstract: Our subjective intuition about memory is that, like a photo-album, it is there to help us reminisce on things past. However, recent theoretical and empirical developments indicate that memory has a more profound role in our lives, which is to prepare us for the future. Indeed, there is a striking overlap between the brain structures that are active when thinking about the past and when imagining the future. After overviewing the different types of memory, and the brain networks that subserve them, the talk will describe the idea of 'memory for the future' and present recent evidence to support it. The role of mental simulations will also be discussed in this context. With this framework in mind, it becomes clearer what determines the information that remains in memory and, perhaps more interestingly, why do we daydream.
