A person recalling a past event can feel as though they are actually reliving it—but science still cannot explain why some memories feel so vivid while others feel flat and distant. This project tackles a fundamental gap: researchers have struggled to turn the subjective experience of remembering into testable scientific questions. By bringing together psychologists, neuroscientists, literary scholars, and historians, the team aims to build a genuinely shared framework for studying memory vividness—one that treats literary and historical accounts of memory as more than just illustrations, but as sources of insight that can reshape how brain scientists design experiments. The work is fundamentally curiosity-driven. There is no immediate clinical or technological application. If successful, it will provide new tools and concepts for studying human experience across disciplines, and open up questions that neither the sciences nor humanities could answer alone. Similar fundamental research on memory has, in the past, informed treatments for PTSD and dementia, and a deeper understanding of vividness could eventually help distinguish normal from pathological remembering, or improve how eyewitness testimony is evaluated.
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What does it feel like to have a memory? We know surprisingly little about how we can vividly relive past events, which functions of the brain are involved, and how these processes vary across individuals, societies and cultures. Scientists have struggled to know how to frame testable hypotheses about the subjective experience of remembering, which is why it is essential to draw on insights from the humanities about the cultural and intellectual contexts in which subjective experience is shaped. There has been rich literary and historical scholarship on many aspects of memory, interpretations that can benefit from engagement with empirically founded accounts from the cognitive sciences. In this project, scientists and humanities scholars will collaborate across disciplines to drive a step-change both in understanding memory vividness and its brain mechanisms across the life-course, and in enhancing the interpretation of vividness in literary and historical works dating back to the early modern era. The proposed work develops an interdisciplinary and translational approach to the study of human experience, building on a collaboration between four experts in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, literary studies and history, who will interact regularly with a wider established Memory Club group from across the sciences and humanities. Our method is genuinely interdisciplinary, a bidirectional process of knowledge co-creation and research design from the humanities to the sciences and vice versa. Using this approach, we will investigate how the psychological and neuroscientific understanding of memory vividness can be transformed by conceptions of memory from the humanities, and explore what literary, historical and other humanities perspectives on memory vividness can gain from engagement with the modern cognitive neuroscience of memory. This timely interdisciplinary project promises transformative outcomes that will change fundamentally our understanding of memory vividness. It will provide science and humanities researchers with new paradigms and tools for the interdisciplinary study of human experience, and allow them to address new 'third-space' questions about the vividness of memory that would not be possible within traditional disciplinary boundaries.
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