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A team led by Ben-Yakov and Ben-Gawker of the University

Feb. 7, 2018 by Carolyn Mueller

A team led by Ben-Yakov and Ben-Gawker of the University of Cambridge has used a similar paradigm to simulate the hippocampus in the film Forrest Gump , a project that uses fMRI to look at the process of 'self-reference' or 'real-time' information.

In the simulation, participants watch Forrest Gump and see the video on a computer screen when they are given a new watch. One can see the video by first clicking a button on the screen and then viewing the video from one side or the other.

"The brain is an automatic mechanism for recording information, and that information can be tracked, stored, and transmitted through a number of channels," explains Ben-Yakov. "You can measure how much information a person has and then measure how hard it is to remember the information. We can measure this information to the absolute smallest measure possible, and then try again. We then see how much information is left in the video by seeing a different watch to measure. In fact, we are able to measure this information over time to see how hard it is to remember."

"The film's story is a remarkable example of the neural basis of a film's story," says Ben-Yakov. "The brain's neural circuitry is very similar to the brain's neocortex, which is where the brain's neocortex operates. The neocortex also controls the brain's neural activity. When you watch Forrest Gump you can see what happens with the brain, but you can't see its internal processes without seeing how it handles the information. It's like hearing a musical note, but you can't remember exactly what it sounds like. This is an important mechanism of how our brain functions."

While such simple changes to our brains can be very difficult to describe, Ben-Yakov and Ben-Gawker are quick to point out the basic mechanism that makes the brain so hard to comprehend. "What's the point of making our brains so hard to understand?" they ask. "Our brains are very different from any other organism. Our brains are made of a lot of cells in our body, and that means we're very different from any other organism."

When we look at our brains over time, we often see things that are not really what we see. For example, people's brains are not much different if they're made of the same cells, but their brain cells don't really match. This is because neurons in the brain are so different because of the way our brains divide