Latest Memory Stories

We put a lot of energy into improving our memory, intelligence, and attention. There are even drugs that make us sharper, such as Ritalin and caffeine. But maybe smarter isn’t really all that better. A new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, warns that there are limits on how smart humans can get, and any increases in thinking ability are likely to come with problems. The authors looked to evolution to...

While researchers have long known that the left hemisphere of the human brain is critical in the process of  producing and decoding semantics and language, the intricacies of the ‘division of labor’ between the different areas of the brain have largely remained a mystery. Technological advances in the field of brain imaging in the last decade, however, have begun to allow researchers to get a better look into the geography of the brain in these extremely complex cognitive processes....

As we get older, our cognitive abilities change, improving when we’re younger and declining as we age. Scientists posit a hierarchical structure within which these abilities are organized. There’s the “lowest” level— measured by specific tests, such as story memory or word memory; the second level, which groups various skills involved in a category of cognitive ability, such as memory, perceptual speed, or reasoning; and finally, the “general,” or G, factor, a sort of...

Walking through doorways causes forgetting, new research shows We've all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find. New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses. "Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away," Radvansky...

FORT WORTH, Texas, Nov. 16, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Top GOP candidates Rick Perry and Herman Cain are experiencing brain freezes and it could cost them the election. Perry couldn't remember the third agency he would eliminate and Cain's brain seemed to lock up when asked about Libya. Two-time USA Memory Champion and memory expert Ron White (http://www.politicalbraincoaching.com) says, "These brain freezes are understandable because of the pressure and potential lack of sleep, but most...

Unless it's Paris Hilton! A 22-year-old woman known as "HC" with amnesia since birth as a result of developing only half the normal volume of the hippocampus in her brain, has demonstrated to scientists that the ability to hold a single face or word in short-term memory is impaired. But there's a catch – only if the information is unfamiliar. When presented with a face such as Hollywood celebrity Paris Hilton and asked to recognize the face a few seconds later, the woman could...

We’re not always aware of how we are making a decision. Unconscious feelings or perceptions may influence us. Another important source of information—even if we’re unaware of it—is the body itself. “Decision making, like other cognitive processes, is an integration of multiple sources of information—memory, visual imagery, and bodily information, like posture,” says Anita Eerland, a psychologist at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In a new study, Eerland and...

Clinical trial findings show memory improvement with daily intake of medical food product A second clinical trial of the medical food Souvenaid confirmed that daily intake of the nutritional intervention improves memory in people with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). Results of the trial - called Souvenir II - were presented at the 4th International Conference on Clinical Trials in Alzheimer's Disease (CTAD) in San Diego, California on Friday, Nov. 4, 2011 by Philip Scheltens, MD, PhD,...

Human memory has historically defied precise scientific description, its biological functions broadly but imperfectly defined in psychological terms. In a pair of papers published in the November 2 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at the University of California, San Diego report a new methodology that more deeply parses how and where certain types of memories are processed in the brain, and challenges earlier assumptions about the role of the hippocampus. Specifically,...

Can the nerve signaling inhibitor tomosyn help retain long-term memory? A new study by two University of Illinois at Chicago biologists points to the link. Findings by Janet Richmond and David Featherstone, both professors of biological sciences at UIC, are reported in the Oct. 31 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This is the first really comprehensive effort to look at the role of tomosyn in fly learning," said Richmond, who until now studied...