Brain has more memories than thought

Washington: What we forget also stay in our memory, says a study which reveals that brains of people house more memories than they think.

Sander Daselaar of the Netherlands' University of Amsterdam and Roberto Cabeza of Duke University studied 14 healthy young adults.

They found that the healthy brain might hold memories even of the "we do not even remember" category, according to the online edition of health magazine WebMD.

The researchers first showed the participants a list of 120 real words mixed with 80 nonsense words.

They then showed them another word list and asked them to try to remember which words had been on the first list

Meanwhile, the researchers conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brains of participants.

While participants reviewed the second word list, their brain scans showed more activity in a certain brain area; the posterior median temporal lobe, when they saw words that had been on the first word list.

However, participants did not much remember that they had seen those words before.

And sometimes, they goofed saying that they had not seen those words before.

"Memories might have a photo album in the brain, but sometimes we forget what's on all of the photo album's pages" the researchers say in the study that appeared in The Journal of Neuroscience.