Memory recall works twice as fast as the blink of an eye

IT TAKES just 150 milliseconds to recall something, half the time it takes to blink.

Memory recall starts with a cue: a jangly doorbell may remind you of a song, say. Information about the cue travels to the brain’s hippocampus, where a set of cells recognise it. These cells trigger an activity pattern that matches that of the memory. This was thought to take about half a second.

Now Simon Hanslmayr at the University of Birmingham, UK, has shown it can happen faster. He monitored brain activity while volunteers recalled the location of an object on a screen. Later, he replayed the objects – but this time at the centre of the screen – and found it took just 150 ms for the memory pattern of the original location to form (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.2101-15.2016).

This suggests the hippocampus was bypassed somehow, he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Memory works faster than blinking”