Alison Preston explains how our brains form mental frameworks for interpreting the world

On this “Brain Inspired” episode, Paul Middlebrooks is joined by Alison Preston, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. We all use schemas—mental frameworks that help organize and interpret information—in our daily lives to guide our behavior in different circumstances. The classic example is a restaurant schema, which taps our past experience to anticipate what to expect and to direct how we act when we dine out. Although schemas were once a psychological concept, neuroscientists are now embracing the idea. Preston examines how neural activity across the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex interact in ways that may underlie the formation and structure of schemas in our brains.

Read the transcript.