Cortical and Hippocampal Pathways to Mental Continuity
- 1Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
How do people preserve mental continuity when tasks are interrupted? One established pathway runs through the hippocampus, which stores snapshots of our mental context for later reinstatement. We propose a second pathway: the brain's default network sustains the interrupted situation as a background process while other processing continues. In 73 adults listening to interrupted stories during functional brain imaging, the posterior medial cortex sustained a reliable and selective representation of the stages of the interrupted narrative. This background representation changed gradually over narrative time and persisted in a transformed format through silence and through a demanding secondary task. Its persistence predicted how reliably the default network resumed the story and how well listeners later recalled it, revealing complementary hippocampal and cortical pathways to mental continuity.
Related
- Hippocampal-Prefrontal Cortical Interactions and Neural Representations of Memory
- Learned Audiovisual Predictability Modulates Depth-Resolved Hippocampal-Cortical Functional Coupling
- Phylogeny of Cortical‐Hippocampal Projections Reveals Selective Elimination of Input From Sensory Regions
- Human hippocampal ripples tune cortical responses based on predicted uncertainty
- Hippocampal Neuronal Overflow and Cortical Reconstruction: A Hypothesis on the Formation of Neural Networks Unique to the Human Brain
BibTeX
@misc{li2026cortical,
title = {{Cortical and Hippocampal Pathways to Mental Continuity}},
author = {X. Li and H. Lee and C. Honey},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.04.749493},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.04.749493v1},
note = {CC BY-NC},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Cortical and Hippocampal Pathways to Mental Continuity
AU - X. Li
AU - H. Lee
AU - C. Honey
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/04
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.04.749493
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.04.749493v1
AB - How do people preserve mental continuity when tasks are interrupted? One established pathway runs through the hippocampus, which stores snapshots of our mental context for later reinstatement. We propose a second pathway: the brain's default network sustains the interrupted situation as a background process while other processing continues. In 73 adults listening to interrupted stories during functional brain imaging, the posterior medial cortex sustained a reliable and selective representation of the stages of the interrupted narrative. This background representation changed gradually over narrative time and persisted in a transformed format through silence and through a demanding secondary task. Its persistence predicted how reliably the default network resumed the story and how well listeners later recalled it, revealing complementary hippocampal and cortical pathways to mental continuity.
ER -