"We've been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory -- to look at actual memory traces," said senior author of the study, Eleanor Maguire.
"We found that our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus. Now that we've seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time."
The results, reported in the March 11 online edition of Current Biology, follow an earlier discovery by the same team that they could tell where a person was standing within a virtual reality room in the same way.
The researchers say the new results move this line of research along because episodic memories -- recollections of everyday events -- are expected to be more complex, and thus more difficult to crack than spatial memory.
In the study, Maguire and her colleagues Martin Chadwick, Demis Hassabis, and Nikolaus Weiskopf showed 10 people each three very short films before brain scanning. Each movie featured a different actress and a fairly similar everyday scenario.
The researchers scanned the participants' brains while the participants were asked to recall each of the films. The researchers then ran the imaging data through a computer algorithm designed to identify patterns in the brain activity associated with memories for each of the films.
Finally, they showed that those patterns could be identified to accurately predict which film a given person was thinking about when he or she was scanned.
The results imply that the traces of episodic memories are found in the brain, and are identifiable, even over many re-activations, the researchers said.
The results reinforce the findings of a 2008 US study that showed similar scans can determine what images people are seeing based on brain activity.
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"It certainly didn't look like this," he said of the car, stroking the broken steering wheel, bandaged now with a piece of plaid cloth.
What could only generously be described as a jalopy looks as if it would be more at home on a scrap heap, waiting to be cannibalised for what little useful metal it has left.
And while 52-year-old Ali admits to sometimes feeling embarrassed being seen out and about status-conscious Kabul in his creaking heap, he says the car has been a close and constant "buddy" through good times and bad -- for both him and for Afghanistan.
"It has always been a good car. It's like my buddy," he told AFP.
In the three decades Ali has owned his Corona, Afghanistan has been in almost constant conflict -- a Soviet invasion and long occupation, a war to drive out the Russians, a civil war, an extremist Taliban regime and, now, another vicious war against Taliban militants.
To Ali as to every Afghan, these past 30 years have brought a mixture of fortunes, but throughout it all, he said, his greatest joy has been weddings.
"This car has seen 264 brides -- right here in the back seat," he says, pointing proudly at the tatty upholstery.
"I kept a record of every bride who sat in my car, and the date of her wedding -- that's how I know the exact number," he said.
In the mid-1970s, Ali was working as a labourer in Saudi Arabia, saving his meagre wages in the hope of putting enough aside to be able to change his lifestyle.
By 1977, he had scraped together enough to start looking around for a good car and, as luck would have it, one of Saudi Arabia's many sheikhs was selling his four-year-old Corona for the equivalent of 60,000 afghanis (12 thousand dollars), or half of Ali's savings of five years.
Ali didn't hesitate and says the car transformed his life, as the plan all along had been to save enough money so that when he got back to his hometown he could become something more than a day labourer.
After buying the car -- in those days a shiny silver -- he drove back to Kabul, via Iraq and Iran, and immediately started his own business, selling secondhand clothing imported from Europe.
Never did he think of the Corona's resale value, uppermost in the mind of most Afghan car-owners, as he never had any intention of selling it.
The greatest joy of becoming a businessman at that time, he said, was driving his own car to work every day.
But the joy was shortlived. In December 1979 the Soviet Union's military machine rolled over Afghanistan's northern border, ostensibly coming to the rescue of a weak communist government.
But the invasion signalled the start of a 10-year occupation which descended into a brutal war that claimed the lives of a million people.
Another four million people fled to neighbouring countries as refugees, and Afghanistan's agriculture-based economy was reduced to dust.
As Afghanistan descended into the horror of war, Ali's life, too, spiralled downwards, he said, as his business went bankrupt.
It was the Corona, he said, that came to his rescue.
As bombs and rockets rained across the country, Ali said goodbye to his sleek silver friend and transformed it into the Kabul cab it is today, painting its panels alternating yellow and white and declaring himself a taxi driver.
As the car aged over the years, its attraction as a bridal carriage declined, but it found a new role during the 1992-1996 civil war -- pressed into service getting wounded people to hospital.
"Many of my passengers during the war were wounded," Ali said, wincing at the memory of a conflict that the UN says left more than 80,000 civilians dead.
"In just one day I evacuated six wounded," he said.
That war gone, the ultra-religious Taliban took over and although their brand of control was harsh in the extreme -- banning music, dancing, games, television and education for girls -- Ali's life was peaceful.
As long as he did the right thing according to the authorities, he said, he could get on with the quiet life of a taxi driver.
Which is just what he did, earning a steady income that has helped him raise seven children, the oldest of whom, a 20-year-old son, is studying engineering at university in Moscow.
These days -- with the country mired in yet another conflict as US and NATO troops battle a Taliban insurgency in its ninth year -- Ali is proud to still be inching through Kabul's gridlocked traffic on appalling roads.
While his passengers are few -- mainly because his car does not look like it would make it around the corner -- taxi drivers with good cars are increasingly vulnerable to kidnap and robbery, and Ali says he feels safe.
"At least no one would steal it from me," he says with a wry smile.
"No one is interested in an old car and an old man. We're safe at least."
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The pair married in the late 1950s despite protests by their families because Urquidi was more than 10 years older and was Vargas Llosa's aunt. They divorced after nearly 10 years of marriage.
Dissatisfied with Vargas Llosa's autobiographical recounting of their relationship, Urquidi penned her own version, "What Varguitas did not say." But her novel failed to attract the same attention as her ex-husband's book.
According to the book, their separation was sudden. The prolific essayist and playwright confessed to Urquidi that he was in love with her niece, Patricia, to whom he remains married to this day.
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The announcement, analysts said, was a slap to a US administration that had persuaded Palestinians to return to talks despite their anger with Washington's decision to drop initial calls for Israel to halt all settlements.
President Barack "Obama did not want nor need a fight with Israel right now. He had other priorities," said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator in past Republican and Democratic administrations.
"This is a huge problem for the Obama administration. Their options are very bad," Miller told AFP.
"If they escalate this situation by continuing a war of words or by trying to impose some kind of accountability... they will lose the proximity (indirect) talks which they've worked so hard to begin," Miller said.
By accountability, he meant the denial of US aid to Israel or some other measure, according to Miller, now a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC.
The other option for Obama is to "live to fight another day and save his pressure and his firmness for an issue like borders (of a future Palestinian state), which is going to come up during the proximity talks," he said.
Miller also warned that a simmering dispute could complicate the US strategy to press other world powers into imposing a fourth round of UN Security Council sanctions on Iran over its nuclear ambitions.
Haim Malka, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said the settlement move was "more about Israeli coalition politics than diplomacy" because the Shas Party controls the interior ministry.
The ministry was "essentially firing a shot across (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu's bow" not to negotiate over Jerusalem, a Shas party plank.
"If Netanyahu is at all serious about talks with the Palestinian Authority, this will be just the beginning of his coalition woes," Malka warned.
"Meanwhile, the Israeli bilateral relationship with the United States has just become much more difficult," he said on the CSIS website.
Daniel Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Egypt and Israel, predicted the row will in the long run amount to a "small bump in the road" toward restoring US-Israeli ties and advancing the very modest indirect talks.
Nevertheless, Kurtzer, who now teaches at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, pointed out the US-backed Palestinian Authority is troubled by the settlement announcement.
"Getting these things off the ground is still not assured," Kurtzer told AFP.
If and when they are launched, US officials will have to apply "some really deft diplomacy" to make progress, especially since the Arab League has given the talks only four months to produce results, he said.
Shortly after he spoke, the Arab League said there should be no talks, direct or indirect, unless Israel halts plans to build 1,600 settler homes in annexed east Jerusalem.
Shibley Telhamy, a Middle East scholar at the University of Maryland, said Biden's condemnation of Israel has given Mahmud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, enough cover to pursue the indirect talks.
"But I think everybody is scratching their heads because the bottom line issue is what if this happens again in two weeks," he warned.
Most analysts have faulted the way the Obama administration has handled the thorny settlement issue from the start, given how difficult it would be to get Netanyahu's right-wing coalition government to agree.
And Kurtzer noted that the Israelis are a "bit oversensitive" that Obama has already visited three key Muslim countries -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey -- without having traveled to the Jewish state, Washington's closest ally.
"He should find a way to get there soon. It's not going to make up for the year of all this griping, but still it will put this issue somewhat behind us," Kurtzer said.
He said the Obama team had somewhat "squandered" the political capital it enjoyed from American Jews and Congress after the 2008 election and only added to concerns Israelis had about him as a presidential candidate.
"So far the peace process has not been one of the star attractions in the administration's portfolio," Kurtzer said.
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