mostly processed memories, but Hassabis showed (with the help of other studies of MRI scans in his thesis) that it was also activated during the act of imagination. In simple terms, this meant that when we had a memory, we were partly imagining it. Our brains weren’t just “replaying” past events by retrieving them, as you might take a file out of a filing cabinet, but actively reconstructing them in the way you might paint a picture. The brain was engaged in a much more dynamic and creative process, which went some way to explain why our memories sometimes were plain wrong and could be
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