Research Hit: Your Brain Creates Meaningful Chapters Throughout the Day

What do you mean that our brain creates “chapters”?

Well, we sequence our day through different blocks, that we form for ourselves. For example we may have breakfast time with family, work time, lunch with friends, important afternoon meeting, commute home, and evening sports. These are saved in our memory as distinct blocks.

That makes sense — and what is new here?

Alexandra De Soares et al. of Columbia University explored this further by manipulating attention to events given in short video sequences to see if this concept of blocking, or creating chapters, could be manipulated.

For example, in my above outline the different locations are obviously important. But is this really how the brain splits up events? What happens if you have a business meeting but then go to lunch to keep discussing? You have changed the location but the discussion is still on business — is this then one “chapter” or two?

And what did they find then?

Well, the most interesting bit is that this more active than we previously thought. Previously we thought that this was primarily driven by these external cues. However the researchers could change that by getting participants to focus on different details. For example, in…