How Social Encounters Prime the Brain to Remember

"Most of us have felt how a strong emotional experience, like an unexpected joy, a painful goodbye, or even the familiar scent of a pastry, can make a moment impossible to forget. Neuroscience has long shown that smells and emotions have physical pathways that lock memories into place. But, surprisingly, we don't just remember personal moments triggered by emotion or scent. We also remember things that happen in a social context, and these memories are supported by physical connections inside the brain."

"A recent study explains how, when you share a fresh social moment, your brain briefly shifts into a state that makes later experiences stick more firmly. During this small window, things that might normally fade can take on a more lasting, vivid quality. The function of your brain, and how it remembers, is impacted by the emotions of social events. Social experience, in other words, can tip the scales toward lasting memory, just like smell or emotion can."

"A Social Spark That Strengthens Memory In the study, mice spent five minutes meeting a new juvenile mouse. Half an hour later, they learned to avoid a mild foot shock in a simple step-down task. That short social encounter made a big difference in the strength of the memory formed. The fear association, which is usually fragile under these conditions, persisted longer than usual."

Brief encounters with new social partners induce a transient brain state that enhances consolidation of immediately subsequent experiences. A five-minute interaction with an unfamiliar juvenile mouse produced stronger, longer-lasting avoidance memory after a mild foot-shock task than interactions with familiar cage-mates. Social engagement increases the likelihood that a fragile emotional memory will consolidate and persist, and it can promote linking of separate memories. Social emotions and sensory cues such as smell can bias memory systems toward durability by creating short windows of enhanced consolidation and memory integration. These effects reflect temporary shifts in neural readiness that prioritize encoding and stabilization of proximal events.

Read at Psychology Today