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AT FIRST, it seems obvious. Memory is about the past. It is your personal database of things you have experienced.

In fact, this repository has a purpose that goes way beyond merely recalling information. Some of the best evidence of this came from studies of people with brain damage or amnesia.

One iconic case was of a patient known as KC in the early 1980s. After a motorcycle accident, he was left with an impaired episodic memory: he could remember facts, but not personal experiences. The weird thing was, it also stopped him doing something else entirely. 鈥淏y studying patients who have an impaired ability to recall the past, we find that they are also impaired at imagining the future,鈥� says Eleanor Maguire at University College London.

We now know there is a strong link between being able to remember past events and being able to plan for the future. Imaging studies, for example, show that similar patterns of brain activity underlie both. The key seems to be the ability to generate images of scenes in the mind鈥檚 eye. 鈥淚f you think about it, recalling the past, imagining the future, and even spatial navigation, typically involve us constructing scene imagery,鈥� says Maguire. It could be that being able to picture the past enabled us to imagine the future, and therefore plan 鈥� one of the complex cognitive feats that stands humans apart from many other species.

If we can鈥檛 recall past events and preferences, our ability to make sound decisions crumbles too. This is because during the decision-making process, the brain uses previous choices and existing knowledge to assess options and imagine how they might turn out.

The latest thinking is that memory could even have evolved to enable our species to communicate. Earlier this year, cognitive scientists Johannes Mahr and Gergely Csibra at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, suggested that the is that we don鈥檛 just recall an event, we also remember how we came to know about it. 鈥淭his is different from just knowing about it,鈥� says Mahr. 鈥淗aving first-hand experience of something gives us authority, makes us more convincing and accurate.鈥�

Sending signals that are convincing is a vital part of managing our social relationships and belief systems, he argues. Without this, we would be unable to justify social entitlements and obligations, such as promises, which is often possible only by explicit reference to past events.

Whether memory led to complex communication or vice versa is not yet known, but what is clear is that far from being a mere databank of the past, memory is essential for our present and future. Now that鈥檚 worth remembering.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淲hat is memory for?鈥�