"We Remember": A Complex Narrative

As we may remember

How we remember what we can do

According to the motor simulation theory, the knowledge we possess of what we can do is based on simulation mechanisms triggered by an off-line activation of the brain areas involved in motor control. Action capabilities memory does not work by storing some content, but consists in the capacity, rooted in sensory-motor systems, to reenact off-line action sequences exhibiting the range of our po...

What we remember from a stressful episode.

A stressful episode is thought to be consolidated better because of a stress-induced activation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. However, human experimental studies addressing this hypothesis directly are lacking. Thus, we investigated memories of the stressful episode itself. Furthermore, we aimed to determine the influence of stress on recollection and familiarity processes. ...

Neurons that Remember How We Got There

In this issue of Neuron, Daie et al. (2015) show that the eye velocity-to-position neural integrator not only encodes the position, but also how it was reached. Representing content and context in the same neuronal population may form a general coding principle.

Why do we remember? The communicative function of episodic memory.

Episodic memory has been analyzed in a number of different ways in both philosophy and psychology, and most controversy has centered on its self-referential, 'autonoetic' character. Here, we offer a comprehensive characterization of episodic memory in representational terms, and propose a novel functional account on this basis. We argue that episodic memory should be understood as a distinctive...