Why does your brain mix up memories? A new study examines how memories are misplaced in your brain’s filing cabinets

A study published in Cerebral Cortex found that older adults are more likely to confuse related memories rather than forget them entirely, misfiling details from one experience into another. Researchers scanned young, middle-aged and older adults as they viewed paired images of faces with scenes or objects, then tested recall after a rest period.

Older participants showed more mix-ups and were less likely to reproduce the original brain-activity patterns from encoding; when they did reproduce those patterns, they were still more prone to error. The authors say the hippocampus appears to alter memories between storage and retrieval as people age, though it remains unclear what a correct retrieval looks like in the aging brain or which other regions might compensate.

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