One of memory’s big jobs is to keep straight what actually happened versus what we imagined: whether we said something out loud or to ourselves, whether we locked the door behind us or just thought about locking the door.
That ability, a new study found, is linked to the presence of a small fold in the front of the brain, which some people have and others don’t—a finding that could help researchers better understand not only healthy memory, but disorders like schizophrenia in which the line between the real and the imagined is blurred.
The researchers looked at MRI brain scans of a large group of healthy adults. In particular, they were looking for the paracingulate sulcus (PCS), a fold near the front of the brain. There’s a lot of variability in the PCS: some people have quite distinctive folds, others have barely any.
It’s in a part of the brain known to be important in keeping track of reality, which is why the researchers chose to study it. Of the 53 people selected for the study, some had this fold on both sides of their brain, some had it on one side, and some had no fold.
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