Have you ever felt like you and your partner are mentally in tune, to the point where you remember or forget the same things? In fact, this is not just an impression. A study published in the journal “Psychological Science” found that when couples remember an event, they synchronize brain activity even if the experience was not shared together, thus forgetting the same details.

This phenomenon suggests that memory is not just a personal archive, but a dynamic and shared system formed by social connections.

The study focuses on a well-known phenomenon in psychology: listeners tend to forget the same information as the speakers. The researchers wanted to understand whether this form of “contagious forgetting” was stronger among romantic partners than among strangers.

To this end, they conducted two experiments: the first involved 19 romantic couples, while the second involved 20 romantic couples and 18 pairs of strangers. In both cases, the participants first learned some information; then, in each pair, one person told the memories and the other listened.

The results showed a clear difference between partners and strangers. In romantic couples, “sticky” forgetting was very pronounced, as listeners forgot details that were not mentioned by the narrator. Meanwhile, in strangers, this effect was not apparent, contrary to what previous studies had suggested.

To understand whether contagious forgetting had a biological basis, the researchers analyzed neural activity. They found that the partners’ brains coordinated: signals in the listener’s lateral prefrontal cortex synchronized with those of the teller. This synchronization was much stronger in couples than in strangers. The stronger the neural connection between the partners, the greater the shared forgetting.

The findings suggest that memory is not a purely individual process. By synchronizing brain activity, partners build a “shared reality”. The next step is to understand whether similar effects are observed among friends or family members, and whether synchronization is strengthened when it comes to emotional memories./tesheshi/

Source: prizrenpost