Your forgotten memories continue to influence the choices you make
We might not think we remember something, but attempting to recall it still fires up activity in our brain linked to memory, which seems to direct our behaviours
By Chris Simms
17 June 2025
Neural activity gets fired up in different parts of the brain when we recall a memory
Nopparit/Getty Images
Even memories that we have forgotten seem to guide our actions, which could tell us more about how they are stored in the brain.
“People intuitively think of memory as something we can recall and wax poetic about,” says Nick Turk-Browne at Yale University, who wasn’t involved in the work. “But we don’t spend most of our days sitting around remembering the past. We’re working, and being parents and having fun, and our memory has this ever-present influence on our behaviour. I would guess 95 per cent of our mind operates in the shadows like this.”
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Our memories can be defined in different ways. One is based on what people report, such as recalling what they ate for dinner last night or what happened on their seventh birthday. Another way is in terms of an enduring pattern or circuit of cells and connections in the brain, known as an engram, that constitutes the biological representation of a remembered experience.
It has been thought by many researchers that when you forget something, the engram related to that memory vanishes. However, research in mice suggests that forgotten memories can persist, they just can’t be consciously recalled.
To see if forgotten memories are also detectable in human brains, Tom Willems at the University of Bern in Switzerland and his colleagues got 40 people to quickly look at 96 pairs of images, made up of a human face and an object, such as a guitar or stapler.
