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October 20, 2025<\/p>\n
4 min read<\/p>\n
Brains Remember Stories Differently Based on How They Were Told<\/p>\n
Telling the same story in different ways can change the brain networks that the listener uses to form memories<\/p>\n
By Allison Parshall edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier<\/span><\/p>\n Javier Zayas Photography\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Tell me about what you had for dinner last night.<\/p>\n There are different ways you could fill in the details of that story. You could give perceptual descriptions of how your food looked and tasted. Or you could focus more on conceptual experiences, such as what that food made you think and feel. In a new brain scan study, neuroscientists found that telling the same story different ways activates different memory mechanisms in the listener\u2019s brain, shaping how someone remembers what you told them.<\/p>\n The results don\u2019t suggest that either form of storytelling\u2014conceptual or perceptual\u2014is necessarily easier to remember than the other; participants in the new study recalled the stories told in these two ways roughly equally. But the findings do show that different storytelling techniques can change how that information is stored and retrieved, perhaps explaining why some people are better at recalling stories with certain types of information compared to others.<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s going to be people who are more perceptual rememberers and other people who are more conceptual rememberers,\u201d says senior author Signy Sheldon, a psychologist studying memory at McGill University. The results were published in JNeurosci on Monday and will be presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference next month.<\/p>\n Memories aren\u2019t stored in one place in the brain. Instead memory traces are distributed throughout networks in the brain\u2019s outer layers. These networks connect to a deep-brain structure called the hippocampus, which helps form, index and retrieve memories.<\/p>\n When forming a memory, the hippocampus tends to engage with some of these brain networks more than others. Sheldon and her colleagues wanted to test whether stories of the exact same events told with different types of details would activate different hippocampal networks. They recruited 35 participants to listen to three mundane stories while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. Each story\u2014of grocery shopping, going to the airport or going to a restaurant with a friend\u2014had two different versions, with either conceptual or perceptual details swapped into the same overall narrative.<\/p>\n For example, in one version of the restaurant story, the narrator says: \u201cA while later, the waiter finally brought us our food. I remember thinking to myself how delicious the pasta was. Looking back, I\u2019m not sure if it was because I was starving or because the food was actually that good.\u201d In the other, they say: \u201cA while later, the waiter finally brought us our food. I remember the two-foot-long pepper mill the waiter used to season our dishes. My spaghetti noodles were swirled around three meatballs on my plate. It looked really good.\u201d After hearing and mentally recalling the stories in the scanner, participants were asked to retell the stories to the researchers.<\/p>\n When participants recalled the stories that they heard with conceptual details in the scanner, their hippocampi activated along with parts of a brain network called the default mode network, or DMN, that is active when processing information about oneself, one\u2019s emotions, and more. In contrast, when people recalled perception-heavy stories, the hippocampus activated along with brain networks outside of the DMN, including the left angular gyrus. This brain region is known to be active when recalling memories that contain detail from various senses.<\/p>\n \u201cI think this roughly aligns with what I would expect,\u201d says Hongmi Lee, a cognitive psychologist studying memory at Purdue University, who wasn\u2019t involved in the new study. The DMN processes high-level, abstract information, so it makes sense that it would become involved to store and retrieve a story framed with a lot of conceptual detail.<\/p>\n Though participants remembered both types of stories equally well in the short term, they tended to prefer the conceptual stories to the perceptual ones and were more confident in their recollections of them. \u201cThese conceptual details are often a really big piece of what people remember from a story,\u201d says Chris Baldassano, a psychologist researching memory at Columbia University, who also wasn\u2019t involved in the new research. \u201cIf you\u2019re watching a movie, you might remember some of the perceptual details, especially if there\u2019s really striking images. But a lot of the real sort of core story is the conceptual things that are happening\u2014the social interactions, the characters, your emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n A preference for conceptual memories may be especially true as people get older. Research shows that as people age, they remember more conceptual details than perceptual ones, shifting away from vivid, event-specific sensory details and toward memories that \u201cget the gist\u201d of what happened. This could be a result of age-related brain changes that make storing and retrieving these lower-level perceptual details more difficult, Sheldon suggests\u2014but it could also be a simple product of having lived more life. When we\u2019re young, \u201cThings are really novel. We\u2019re going to pay attention to everything,\u201d Sheldon says. \u201cBut as we get older, we use memories more for social connection, and we often are recalling and describing things that we are more familiar with.\u201d<\/p>\n If you want someone to remember the story you\u2019re telling, details of any kind tend to help\u2014especially if they are relevant and unique. \u201cWe know that this helps create memories that are easier to access later on,\u201d Baldassano says. \u201cIt gives you more potential \u2018hooks\u2019 for you to find that memory later on if there\u2019s lots of details attached.\u201d<\/p>\n If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. 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I hope it does that for you, too.<\/p>\n If you subscribe to Scientific American<\/span>, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.<\/p>\n In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can’t-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world’s best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.<\/p>\n There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" October 20, 2025 4 min read Brains Remember Stories Differently Based on How They Were Told Telling the same story in different ways can change the brain networks that the listener uses to form memories By Allison Parshall edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier Javier Zayas Photography\/Getty Images Tell me about what you had for dinner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[14171,2121,659,5954,14002,17379,17378,14356],"class_list":{"0":"post-29410","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-alter","9":"tag-brain","10":"tag-find","11":"tag-memories","12":"tag-methods","13":"tag-neuroscientists","14":"tag-stored","15":"tag-storytelling"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n
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