memory
dmunger | July 28, 2009Take a look at this quick movie. What you'll see is two sets of three views of the same scene (our living room). For each group of three views, your job is to decide if the third view is taken from the same angle as one of the two previous views. After the first two views flash by, the text "Same?" will appear, and that's your cue to decide if the third view is the same as EITHER of the first two. Give it a shot:
Do you think you got the correct answer? Was either of the two sequences more difficult than the other?
The movie was inspired by a recent experiment led by Monica Castelhano.…
dmunger | July 23, 2009[Originally posted in April 2007]
Cognitive decline as we age is all over the news lately. "Brain fitness" products are available for cell phones, Game Boys, and Xboxes, all designed to prevent the natural decline in cognitive ability as we age. There's even a significant body of work suggesting that this sort of product really can work.
But some of the brain games can be dull, repetitive work: memory tasks, number games, and optical illusions, while endlessly fascinating to cognitive scientists, might be less appealing to the general population.
Researchers Helga and Tony Noice believe that…
dmunger | July 20, 2009[Originally posted in January 2008]
When we watch a movie, we're usually not conscious of the cuts made by the editor. The camera angle may change dozens of times during a scene, and we follow along as if the flashing from one viewpoint to another wasn't at all unusual. You might think this is just because we've been accustomed to watching TV and movies, but researchers have found that even people who've never seen a motion picture have no difficulty following along with the cuts and different camera angles in a video.
But little research has actually been done on the impact of changing…
purepedantry | July 15, 2009In neuroscience, we spend most of our time trying to understand the function of the "normal" brain -- whatever that means -- hence, we are most interested in the average. Under most occasions when scientists take an interest in the abnormal neurology, it is usually someone with who has something wrong with them -- has brain damage or a disorder of some kind. In these cases, we try and understand what brain functions they have difficulty performing as a way to understand what each part of the brain does (and hopefully to someday be able to help them).
The point is that when neurologists…
edyong | July 12, 2009
Our mind often seems like a gigantic library, where memories are written on parchment and stored away on shelves. Once filed, they remain steadfast and inviolate over time, although some may eventually become dusty and forgotten.
Now, Reut Shema, Yadin Dudai and colleagues from the Weizmann Institute of Science have found evidence that challenges this analogy. According to their work, our memory is more like a dynamic machine - it requires a constant energy supply to work. Cut the power and memories are lost.
Shema found that the plug that powers our memories is an enzyme called PKMzeta…
ddobbs | July 9, 2009Both Mind Hacks and Jonah Lehrer took interesting note -- Jonah's the longer, and a pretty nice summary itself -- of the fascinating NY Times piece on ultramarathoner Diane Van Deren, who began running long distances after brain surgery removed much of her right temporal lobe. This gave her a great advantage: the lack of memory of the run behind her, and thus of any dread of the punishment still to come. Downside: significant memory problems, and she can't read a map.
Speaking of memory ...
Newsweek has a good piece on unconscious plagiarism -- that is, how genuine lapses in "source memory…
dmunger | June 24, 2009Take a look at the following pictures of U.S. dimes. As you can see, they are slightly different from one another -- the date is in the incorrect spot on one of them. Can you tell which one is "wrong"?
Let's make this a poll:
Which dime has the date in the correct spot?(polls)
Is there anything else wrong with the dimes?(polling)
Don't look at your pocket change before you answer! In case you don't have a dime handy, I'll reveal the correct answer later in the post.
Even though most Americans will say they know what U.S. coins look like, a similar study in 1979 found that people can't…
neurophilosophy | June 15, 2009MEMORY, Blake wrote, enables us to "traverse times and spaces far remote". It constitutes mental time travel, with which we can recollect, in vivid detail, events that took place many years ago. We have known, for the best part of a century, that memory is reconstructive rather than reproductive. That is, recollection involves piecing together specific details of the event, and mixing these with our own biases and beliefs. While not being completely accurate, our memories are, in most cases, reliable enough.
It is because of the reconstructive nature of memory that we are able to travel…
dmunger | May 27, 2009A common defense in murder cases is "focal retrograde amnesia": the defendant claims to have simply forgotten what occurred around the time of the crime (perhaps due having consumed too much alcohol or other drugs). In fact, "amnesia" is claimed in as many as 45 percent of murders. Psychologists know that this sort of amnesia is actually quite rare, so it's very likely that most, if not all of these defendants are faking amnesia.
We can confirm that many of these cases are faked: when defendants are given multiple-choice questions about the crime, they get the answers wrong too often. Think…
dmunger | May 21, 2009Last night in the U.S. many televisions were tuned to one of the biggest spectacles of the year: the American Idol finale, where America would learn which singer had been chosen as "America's favorite" (or, more cynically, who inspired the most teenagers to repeatedly dial toll-free numbers until all hours of the night). Greta and I are suckers for this sort of thing, so we watched along with the rest of the nation.
What impressed me about the show wasn't so much the prodigious vocal talents of the two finalists, but how everything was put together so hastily: there had been only six days…
dmunger | May 18, 2009If, like me, you grew up in the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s, you probably remember the game show Name That Tune, where contestants heard brief snippets from popular songs and had to name them as quickly as possible. Even though I didn't know most of the music, which was primarily American Standards from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, I still found the show fascinating. My favorite part of the game was when the two contestants engaged in a bidding war, where a clue was given and the contestants bet on how few notes it would take them to recall the title of the song. Sometimes a contestant could actually…
dmunger | May 11, 2009I'll never forget the one and only time my mom made quiche for dinner. I was in fourth grade, and she had proudly followed the recipe in "Joy of Cooking" to create an exciting gourmet treat. Naturally, my sister and I absolutely hated it, but mom made us clean our plates. Choking down that quiche (which I now love) is one of my most vivid childhood memories.
This scene, or some version of it, has been repeated countless in kitchens around the world as parents try to introduce new foods to kids who prefer the tried-and-true meals they've grown accustomed to. For some, it might be Brussels…
dmunger | April 16, 2009Several studies have confirmed this bizarre proposition: If you're taking a test of rote memorization, like words from a list, move your eyes from side to side for about 30 seconds before you start. Really.
Researchers have found, with relative consistency, that if you saccade from left to right and back several times before a test of simple recall, you're likely to do better. Why? It may be that this quick activity helps facilitate interaction between the brain hemispheres. Since split-brain patients have more difficulty recalling words than people with normal brains, any activity that…
dmunger | March 23, 2009Last week I mentioned that Greta had been discussing a study with her class that was related to the fable of the Fox and the Grapes. When most of her students hadn't heard the story, it provided the opportunity for a lengthy aside: our Casual Fridays study about which stories people had and hadn't heard.
Greta didn't bring up the story in class to embarrass her students about their apparent lack of knowledge of children's stories; she mentioned it because it's probably the easiest way to understand an important psychological phenomenon called "behavior-induced attitude change."
The fable…
neurophilosophy | March 18, 2009Memory has intrigued us for millenia, and is today one of the most active areas of neuroscience research. Much of this research has aimed to understand how memories are laid down, and a picture of how this happens is beginning to emerge. Hundreds of studies published over the past few decades provide evidence that memory formation involves widespread reorganization of connections in the brain.
The vast majority of memory research has therefore pertained to the neural processes which occur after the event that is being memorized. More recently, though, a number of studies have suggested that…
neurophilosophy | March 12, 2009Spatial navigation is a complex mental task which is strongly dependent upon memory. As we make our way around a new environment, we look for easily recognisable landmarks and try to remember how their locations are related in space, so that when we return to it we can negotiate our path.
We know that spatial representations are encoded in the medial temporal lobe, and numerous studies implicate the hippocampus in particular as being crucial for the formation of spatial memories. Information about the environment is believed to be encoded by large populations of neurons distributed…
edyong | March 12, 2009A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about propranolol, a drug that can erase the emotion of fearful memories. When volunteers take the drug before recalling a scary memory about a spider, it dulled the emotional sting of future recollections. It's not, however, a mind-wiping pill in the traditional science-fiction sense, and it can't erase memories as was so widely reported by the hysterical mainstream media.
The research that's published today is a different story. Jin-Hee Han from the University of Toronto has indeed found a way to erase a specific fearful memory, but despite the superficial…
dmunger | March 11, 2009There's been a ton of research on the impact of working memory: its importance in learning, its effect on math skills, and its relationship to other mental abilities. Yesterday's entry on The Wild Side discusses working memory's relationship with IQ. It's been shown that adults can improve working memory with training, and training has even been shown to work for kids as young as seven.
There are clearly tremendous benefits to working memory (and at least one down side). A related mental function, inhibitory control, is also a key to many cognitive abilities. But if working memory training…
neurophilosophy | March 10, 2009One of the central dogmas of neuroscience, which persisted for much of the history of the discipline, was that the adult human brain is immalleable, and could not change itself once fully developed. However, we now know that this is not the case: rather than setting like clay placed into a mould, the brain remains pliable, like a piece of putty, so that each new experience makes a lasting impression upon it.
This phenomenon, referred to as synaptic (or neural) plasticity, involves reorganization of the connections between nerve cells, and is arguably the most important discovery in…
neurophilosophy | March 9, 2009More than 100 years ago, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, proposed a mechanism called repression, whereby desires and impulses are actively pushed into the unconscious mind. For Freud, repression was a defence mechanism - the repressed memories are often traumatic in nature, but, although hidden, they continue to exert an effect on behaviour.
Many of Freud's theories have long since been discredited, but they remain influential to this day. Repression in particular has proven to be extremely controversial. It has attracted much attention in the context of the many legal cases…