Remembering Without Knowing It
Ever notice when you walk into a room that you know something has changed and it takes a moment to realize what’s missing? Your eyes may know the answer before you do, as simple memory games have shown that your eyes focus on the correct answer before you are able to identify it.
By observing the hippocampus part of the brain, which is responsible for traditional memories, neuroscientists Deborah Hannula and Charan Ranganath noted that persons giving incorrect answers still had increased activity when their eyes observed the correct answer. The prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is responsible for decision making, mirrored the behavior of the hippocampus.
So your hippocampus may have made the connection that the napkin holder is missing, but your PFC must get involved for you to realize it. “The idea is that recollection may be a two-stage process,” Hannula says. “First you have retrieval of the memory, and then you have a conscious appreciation of what’s been retrieved.”
The study provides strong support for the idea that the hippocampus can process relational memories without a person being aware of it, says Boston University neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum.
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Psychologist Says: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber
Or to be more precise, Dr. Tracy Alloway of the University of Stirling in Scotland says that in a study, Facebook users showed increased working memory, whereas Twitter users showed decreased working memory. She concluded that Facebook has more mentally intensive activities, but Twitter’s communications are too brief to require substantial brain activity:
Dr. Alloway has developed a working memory training programme for slow-learning children aged 11 to 14 at a school in Durham, and she found out that Facebook did wonders for working memory, improving the kids’ IQ scores, while YouTube and Twitter’s steady stream of information was not healthy for working memory. Also, playing video games, especially those that involve planning and strategy, can also be beneficial.
Link via The Presurfer
Image: U.S. Department of Energy
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Recent Advances in Nanotechnology May Lead to a Massive Increase in Memory Capacity
There are two very exciting recent advances in nanotechnology may soon result in a massive increase in memory capacities of your DVDs and iPods:
Researchers
at the Centre for Micro-Photonics at the Swinburne University of Technology
in Victoria, Australia, created a new material that could lead to new
discs that can store 10,000 times more data than your average DVDs.
The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic spun flat on a glass substrate. Multiple data patterns can be written and read within the same area in the material without interfering with each other. Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers have written six different patterns within the same area. They've further increased the storage density to 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of as many as 10 nanorod layers. In a paper published online today in the journal Nature, Gu's group reports recording speeds of about a gigabit per second.
The picture to the right shows 6 patterns written in the same area of the nanorods using three different color and two different polarization of lasers: Link (Photo credit: Nature Publishing Group)
(Image: Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and
University of California at Berkeley)
- Berkeley (yay! My alma mater) researcher Alex Zettl and colleagues
created a physical memory cell composed of an iron nanoparticle that
can be moved back and forth in a nanotube. The position of the iron
particle represents the state of the bit, which leads to very dense
and highly stabile memory arrays, resulting in very long lifetime: Link
How stable is stable? Here's a chart that shows typical storage lifetimes vs bit density for a variety of storage media. As you can see, his stuff beats rock!
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Jill Price: The Woman Who Can't Forget
Quick: what did you have for lunch yesterday? How about two days ago? If you remember, then you have a pretty good memory – but how about remembering everything you have seen and experienced throughout your life in vivid detail as if it was happening right now?
Meet Jill Price, the woman who simply could not forget:
The three UC Irvine scientists who studied her decided that her case deserved its own name—hyperthymestic syndrome, academic Greek for "exceptional memory"—and it’s not hard to see why.
I come prepared with a stack of questionnaires, and when we return to her house, Price is kind enough to let me administer my tests, easily blowing through the first few. I ask, for example, if she can tell me some dates of famous accidents and airline crashes; she’s all but unstoppable. She instantly retrieves from memory the exact dates of the explosions of space shuttle Challenger and Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. She remembers not just that September 25, 1978, was when a PSA flight crashed in San Diego but also that the jet collided with a Cessna. She can go in either direction, disaster to date or date to disaster. When I say "January 13, 1982," Price has no trouble recalling the Air Florida flight that plummeted into the Potomac.
According to McGaugh’s Neurocase article, Price is even more astounding on the events of her own life. At the scientists’ behest, for example, she recalled—without warning and in just 10 minutes—what she’d done on every Easter since 1980. "April 6, 1980: 9th grade, Easter vacation ends. April 19, 1981: 10th grade, new boyfriend, H. April 11, 1982: 11th grade, grandparents visiting for Passover ..
And before you think it’s a wonderful thing to have such a prodigious memory, imagine this: Jill Price remembers all the sad and bad things in her life – the death of loved ones, for instance, like it’s happening right now. Time heals all wounds, but not for Jill Price.
Link (Photo: Bryce Duffy)
Here’s a clip of Jill Price as interviewed on 20/20 by Diane Sawyer:
Jill recounts her experience in her new book: The Woman Who Can’t Forget
If you find this interesting, check out our previous post: 10 Most Fascinating Savants in the World
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Cognitive Ability Declines Starting at Age 27
Sorry to bring you the bad news, guys. Timothy Salthouse, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia studying cognitive aging, found that reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualization start to decline at age 27:
The first age at which there was any marked decline was at 27 in tests of brain speed, reasoning and visual puzzle-solving ability.
Things like memory stayed intact until the age of 37, on average, while abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60.
Professor Salthouse said his findings suggested "some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy, educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s."
Link – via Blue’s News
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Soundory: A Fun Aural Memory Game
Remember the memory game "concentration" that you play with cards?
Well, Philipp Lenssen of Games for the Brain (Philipp is also the man behind the awesome Google Blogoscoped blog) and Nikolai Kordulla created a version that will challenge your aural memory as opposed to your visual one. Check out Soundory, which uses snippets Amazon MP3 widget – it’s quite a lot of fun!
Link – Thanks Philipp!
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Doodlers Rejoice! Doodling is Actually Good For You!
Do you doodle when you’re bored? Turns out, those idle scribbles actually serve a beneficial purpose: doodling help you retain information in the event of boredom!
In a delightful new study, which will be published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, psychologist Jackie Andrade of the University of Plymouth in southern England showed that doodlers actually remember more than nondoodlers when asked to retain tediously delivered information, like, say, during a boring meeting or a lecture.
In her small but rigorous study, Andrade separated 40 participants into two groups of 20. All 40 had just finished an unrelated psychological experiment, and many were thinking of going home (or to the pub). They were asked, instead, whether they wouldn’t mind spending an additional five minutes helping with research. The participants were led into a quiet room and asked to listen to a 2½-min. tape that they were told would be "rather dull." [...]
Before the tape began, half the study participants were asked to shade in some little squares and circles on a piece of paper while they listened. They were told not to worry about being neat or quick about it. (Andrade did not instruct people explicitly to "doodle," which might have prompted self-consciousness about what constituted an official doodle.) The other 20 didn’t doodle. All the participants were asked to write the names of those coming to the party while the tape played, which meant the doodlers switched between their doodles and their lists.
Afterward, the papers were removed and the 40 volunteers were asked to recall, orally, the place names and the names of the people coming to the party. The doodlers creamed the nondoodlers: those who doodled during the tape recalled 7.5 pieces of information (out of 16 total) on average, 29% more than the average of 5.8 recalled by the control group.
John Cloud of TIME Magazine has more: Link
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