Topic: autobiographical memory

Vinod Menon examines the brain's default mode network as a foundation for autobiographical memory, self-related processing, and consciousness, and considers how these functions compare with current artificial intelligence systems. The virtual session is part of Stanford's Contemplation by Design Summit.

Autobiographical memories are the ghosts of our past. Through them we visit places long departed, see faces once familiar, and hear voices now silent. These, often decades-old, personal experiences can be recalled on a whim or come unbidden into our everyday consciousness. Autobiographical memories are crucial to cognition because they facilitate almost everything we do, endow us with a sense of self and underwrite our capacity for autonomy. They are often compromised by common neurological and psychiatric pathologies with devastating effects. Despite autobiographical memories being central t

Mounting evidence suggests that autobiographical memory is crucially dependent on our ability to construct visual mental images. Indeed, we have found previously that aphantasics (people who cannot construct mental images) have more difficulties to recall personal memories than controls and that aphantasics showed decreased hippocampal activation during autobiographical memory. While aphantasia is a subjective condition of deficient mental imagery, in a follow-up study, we examine the neural correlates of autobiographical memory in a very rare patient population, people who are blind from birt