Darren Hayes shares the story of a truly memorable Christmas from his childhood. He grew up to form half the musical duo Savage Garden. The song is the instrumental version of “Bloodstained Heart” from his latest album Secret Codes and Battleships. Link -via Laughing Squid

Is there a "unit" of memory? Some scientists now think so.

Using a method that allowed them to make brain measurements down to the millisecond levels, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology discovered that there's a discrete "quantum" of memory:

You're rudely awakened by the phone. Your room is pitch black. It's unsettling, because you're a little uncertain about where you are -- and then you remember. You're in a hotel room.

Sound like a familiar experience? Or maybe you've felt a similar kind of disorientation when you walk out of an elevator onto the wrong floor? But what actually happens inside your head when you experience moments like these?

[A new study] describes exactly how the brain reacts in situations like these, during the transition between one memory and the next. [...]

Their findings show that memory is divided into discrete individual packets, analogous to the way that light is divvied up into individual bits called quanta. Each memory is just 125 milliseconds long -- which means the brain can swap between different memories as often as eight times in one second.

"The brain won't let itself get confused," says Professor May-Britt Moser. "It never mixes different places and memories together, even though you might perceive it that way. This is because the processes taking place inside your head when your brain is looking for a map of where you are take place so fast that you don't notice that you are actually switching between different maps. When you feel a little confused, it is because there is a competition in your brain between two memories. Or maybe more than two."

Link

If you can Google it, why bother remembering? Being able to access facts with just a few keystroke definitely improved our lives, but it has actually changed the way our memories work.

A study of 46 college students found lower rates of recall on newly-learned facts when students thought those facts were saved on a computer for later recovery.

If you think a fact is conveniently available online, then, you may be less apt to learn it.

As ominous as that sounds, however, study co-author and Columbia University psychologist Elizabeth Sparrow said it’s just another form of so-called transactive memory, exhibited by people working in groups in which facts and expertise are distributed.

“It’s very similar to how we use people in our lives,” said Sparrow. “The internet is really just an interface with a lot of other people.”

Like Einstein said, never memorize what you can look up: Link

Not so, according to a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist:

According to a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist, however, the real trouble is that our aging brains are unable to process this information as "new" because the brain pathways leading to the hippocampus — the area of the brain that stores memories — become degraded over time. As a result, our brains cannot accurately "file" new information (like where we left the car that particular morning), and confusion results.

"Our research uses brain imaging techniques that investigate both the brain’s functional and structural integrity to demonstrate that age is associated with a reduction in the hippocampus’s ability to do its job, and this is related to the reduced input it is getting from the rest of the brain," said Michael Yassa, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. "As we get older, we are much more susceptible to ‘interference’ from older memories than we are when we are younger."

In other words, when faced with an experience similar to what it has encountered before, such as parking the car, our brain tends to recall old information it already has stored instead of filing new information and being able to retrieve that. The result? You can’t find your car immediately and find yourself wandering the parking lot.
"Maybe this is also why we tend to reminisce so much more as we get older: because it is easier to recall old memories than make new ones," Yassa speculated.

So when you see me repost things that have been on Neatorama before, this may just be the reason: Link

Photo: Shutterstock

Painted Eggs is a memory game appropriate for the Easter season. You’ll be shown a colored egg. All you have to do is remember what color(s) it was painted and then reproduce them. But it gets harder as you go along! Link -via Look At This

Cooke and all the other mental athletes I met kept insisting that anyone could do what they do. It was simply a matter of learning to “think in more memorable ways,” using a set of mnemonic techniques almost all of which were invented in ancient Greece. These techniques existed not to memorize useless information like decks of playing cards but to etch into the brain foundational texts and ideas.

It was an attractive fantasy. If only I could learn to remember like Cooke, I figured, I would be able to commit reams of poetry to heart and really absorb it. I imagined being one of those admirable (if sometimes insufferable) individuals who always has an apposite quotation to drop into conversation. How many worthwhile ideas have gone unthought and connections unmade because of my memory’s shortcomings?

At the time, I didn’t quite believe Cooke’s bold claims about the latent mnemonic potential in all of us. But they seemed worth investigating. Cooke offered to serve as my coach and trainer. Memorizing would become a part of my daily routine. Like flossing. Except that I would actually remember to do it.

Foer did his research on memory (which he shares) and then began to train his own. As his memorization skills improved, he decided to enter the U.S.A. Memory Championship himself. And then he won it. Link

(Image credit: Marco Grob for The New York Times)

Turns out, alcohol placebos can also impair your memory and judgment:

Subjects drank plain tonic water, but half were told it was a vodka and tonic; then all subjects took part in an eyewitness memory experiment.

Subjects who were told they drank alcohol were more swayed by misleading postevent information than were those who were told they drank tonic water, and were also more confident about the accuracy of their responses.

Our results show that the mere suggestion of alcohol consumption may make subjects more susceptible to misleading information and inappropriately confident. These results also provide additional confirmation that eyewitness memory is influenced by both nonsocial and social factors.

Link

By looking at that process, Huganir and postdoctoral fellow Roger L. Clem discovered a “window of vulnerability” when unique receptor proteins are created. The proteins mediate signals traveling within the brain as painful memories are made. Because the proteins are unstable, they can be easily removed with drugs or behavior therapy during the window, ensuring the memory is eliminated.

Link via MArooned | Image: Columbia Pictures

The Edinburgh team showed that knocking out either one or both copies of the gene for this enzyme in mice preserved the animals’ memory into old age. To determine whether blocking the enzyme could improve memory in already aged animals, researchers then developed a compound designed to cross into the brain and inhibit the enzyme. Just 10 days of treatment in two-year-old mice–the maximum lifespan for a typical lab mouse–was enough to improve the animals’ performance on a test of spatial memory.

Link via Glenn Reynolds | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user jepoirrier used under Creative Commons license

Seamon and his team asked JB to take part in tests regarding the epic work where they cued him with two lines selected from anywhere in the poem and asked him to recall the following 10 lines. In one part they picked out lines as they went through the books in order, in another they just chose books at random.

He seemed to stumble on a couple of books when they were tackled sequentially, but generally his verbatim recall was generally above 90% and seemed more consistent when the books were picked out randomly. The team also video-taped one of his live performances and found his average accuracy was between 97% and 98%.

JB is no savant; his accomplishments apparently came from hard work and dedication to the task. Link -via Nag on the Lake

[YouTube - Link]

This American Life, the well known show on NPR, had its television debut a couple years ago. This animation is from their second season and reveals an extreme example of how memories can shape themselves through something called the “misinformation effect.”

In truth, memories are reconstructed each time we recall them which can lead to one telling a small lie in a memory and eventually believing that lie to be true further down the road.

Link via Doobybrain

The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive. Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.

Link | Image: US Department of Health and Human Services

When they touched the first digit, the others were replaced with white squares, and they had to rely on their memory to press the right sequence. The young chimps took to this task particularly well and amazingly, they finished the task more quickly than human adults…

When the numbers were flashed for two thirds of a second, Ayumu’s skills were the equal of 6 university students who pressed the right sequence 80% of the time. If the numbers were displayed for just a fifth of a second, the students couldn’t cope. They didn’t have enough time to make a single saccade, the small eye flickers that we make when we scan a page or image. Without the luxury of exploring the screen, the students only answered accurately 40% of the time. Ayumu, on the other hand, wasn’t fazed and maintained his earlier high scores.

The researchers also postulate that human children may have similar eidetic abilities when they are very young, but lose this capacity by the time they finish school.  Or something like that – I can’t remember.

Link.

Scientists have found that hearing specific sounds during deep sleep can improve memory and recall. [...]

Scientists asked a group of students to look at 50 objects, including a cat and a kettle, which were all paired to a specific location on a computer screen.

They then asked the volunteers to lie down and as they slept played them a series of sounds related to half of the objects, including a miaow [sic] and a kettle boiling.

Tested later the students were better able to correctly place an object whose sounds that had heard with their locations.

"The research strongly suggests that we don’t shut down our minds during deep sleep," said John Rudoy, from Northwestern University, in Chicago, who led the study. "Rather this is an important time for consolidating memories."

Link

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.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by OddNumber.

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

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!

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:

[YouTube clip]

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

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

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!

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