Embodying our memories with hippocampal-premotor cortex coupling

Episodic memory (EM) allows us to remember and relive past events and experiences and has been linked to cortical-hippocampal reinstatement of encoding activity. While EM is fundamental to establish a sense of self across time, this claim and its link to the sense of agency (SoA), based on bodily signals, has not been tested experimentally. Using real-time sensorimotor stimulation, immersive virtual reality, and fMRI Meyer, Gauthier and colleagues manipulated the SoA and report stronger hippocampal reinstatement for scenes encoded under preserved SoA, reflecting recall performance in a recognition task. Next, they linked the SoA to EM by showing that hippocampal reinstatement is coupled with reinstatement in premotor cortex, a key SoA region. In an in-depth clinical case study, Meyer and Gauthier extended these findings and tested a severe amnesic patient whose memory lacked the normal dependency on the SoA. Premotor-hippocampal coupling in EM describes how a key aspect of the bodily self – the sense of agency - at encoding is neurally reinstated during the retrieval of past life episodes, enabling the emergence of a sense of self across time.