Memories & environment

Scientists have revealed that a person's memories are linked to the environment they live in.

University of Toronto researchers have revealed that a person's memories are linked to the environment in which they were created in.

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In other words, it is easier for people to recall something when they are in the same environment as when that particular memory was created.

While conducting the study, which was published in this week's issue of the medical journal Current Biology, researchers studied C. elegans, a worm whose genome has been completely sequenced, to demonstrate that animals absorb information about their environment and modulate their behaviour accordingly.

The researchers first placed worms on agar plates treated with a salt medium, exposed them to the smell of benzaldehyde and trained them to associate the smell with starvation. If a worm was returned to the salt medium where it had been trained, it showed a distaste for the benzaldehyde odour, but it did not demonstrate this memory in a different salt medium.

Scientists are now hoping to find the specific gene involved in processing environmental cues. Once it is identified, researchers will be able to search for similar genes in humans in order to shed light on the workings of human memory.

"This is something people intuitively said was important. This is an important bridge between psychology and neurobiology. Affecting an environment affects your ability to learn," said Eric Law, a PhD candidate, at the Department of Medical Genetics and Microbiology in the University of Toronto.