How the brain helps us remember what we’ve seen

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"... This capability of “visual working memory” feels effortless, but a new MIT study shows that the brain works hard to keep up. Whenever a key object shifts across our field of view — either because it moved or our eyes did — the brain immediately transfers a memory of it by re-encoding it among neurons in the opposite brain hemisphere. ..."

"Visual working memory (WM) storage is largely independent between the left and right visual hemifields/cerebral hemispheres, yet somehow WM feels seamless. ... An instructed saccade during the WM delay shifted the remembered location from one hemifield to the other. Before the shift, spike rates and oscillatory power showed clear signatures of memory laterality. After the shift, the lateralization inverted, consistent with transfer of the memory trace from one hemisphere to the other. ..."

How the brain helps us remember what we’ve seen | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research finds that as one looks around, mental images bounce between right and left brain as they shift around in our visual system.

Here is the underlying research paper:

Interhemispheric transfer of working memories