Links for Keyword: Learning & Memory

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By Laura Sanders In a paradoxical twist, people with amnesia can get bogged down by too many memories. Unwanted, irrelevant information crowds in and prevent amnesiac patients from recognizing objects, scientists report in the July 12 Neuron. The finding suggests that amnesia isn’t strictly a memory problem, and it may even point out ways to help people with the disorder live more normally. Most people consider amnesia a breakdown of memory that leaves people unable to recall a conversation they had minutes earlier, says study coauthor Morgan Barense of the University of Toronto. While it’s true that people with amnesia have striking memory deficits, “the real picture is more complicated,” she says. People with amnesia caused by damage to a brain region near the ears called the perirhinal cortex also have problems recognizing objects, Barense and colleagues found. In the study, two people with this form of amnesia assessed a series of pictures of two objects — squiggly blobs with distinctive patterns of lines. The objects, shown at different rotations, were either identical or slightly different. At first, people with amnesia were just as good as people with functioning recall at deciding whether the two objects were the same. But as the experiment wore on, participants’ performance started to crash. “They’re doing fine, they’re doing fine — and then all of a sudden, it was like a switch flipped,” says Barense. After ruling out other possibilities, the researchers landed on what Barense calls a “wildly paradoxical conclusion” to explain the crash: too many memories. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 17030 - Posted: 07.12.2012

Bee Brain Plasticity: Turning Back the Clock on Aging

By Kara Rogers The honeybee brain is dynamic and full of surprises. For instance, much like the human brain, its neurons not only modulate their activity in response to sensory stimuli but also alter their gene and protein expression patterns—changes that in bees are so dramatic as to essentially rewire the brain. And even more remarkable is that this plasticity is strongly influenced by social environment, a feature that was underscored recently by the discovery that bees who changed social roles effectively reversed the aging of their brains. The reversal, described in terms of recovery of learning ability, occurred when older honeybees reverted from foraging tasks to caring for newborn bees and was linked to increased brain levels of stress response and antioxidant proteins, which serve important cellular maintenance and repair functions. One of the proteins was similar to the mammalian enzyme peroxiredoxin-6 (Prx6). In humans, Prx6 defends against oxidative stress and inflammation associated with Alzheimer disease and Huntington disease, indicating that a better understanding of the molecules involved in brain plasticity and cognitive recovery in honeybees could inform research on dementia and related conditions. The new findings are especially intriguing for what they suggest about the influence of social environment on cognitive function. Studies in humans have linked strong social relationships with increased likelihood for survival and declining social engagement in mid- to late-life with increasing risk of dementia. However, relatively little is known about the significance of social environment in the context of human cognitive function and aging. © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 17027 - Posted: 07.12.2012

Tail Shakes Scare Snakes

by Krystnell A. Storr For California ground squirrels, survival against rattlesnakes often comes down to one basic question: Are you willing to "shake it?" By holding their tails upright and thrashing them from side to side, the animals notify predators that any attempt to turn them into a meal is likely to end in failure. Now researchers have discovered that this tail-waving behavior has a dual purpose. Not only does it ward off predators, but it also warns other squirrels of potential danger, forcing rattlesnakes to find new hunting grounds. Pacific rattlesnakes (Crotalus oreganus oreganus) are patient hunters. They wait for hours in or around the burrows of California ground squirrels (Otospermophilus beecheyi). When an unsuspecting squirrel gets close enough, the snake delivers a venomous bite, releases the animal, and hunts for the dead body later. Scientists knew that some squirrels avoid attack by shaking their tails after seeing a snake, but sometimes squirrels did this even when they didn't detect a predator. Were they clued into some sort of alarm call or just waving at random? Matthew Barbour and Rulon Clark decided to investigate things from a snake's perspective. Armed with snake tongs and bags, the San Diego State University ecologists trekked into the California wilderness and captured and anesthetized 22 rattlesnakes, surgically implanting them with small tracking devices. As soon as the snakes recovered, the duo released them back into the wild, keeping tabs on them with the tracking devices and security cameras set up around several squirrel burrows. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 17024 - Posted: 07.11.2012

Implanted electrodes offer clues to brain's 'thesaurus'

by Andy Coghlan One of the key elements of memory – how we store and retrieve words according to what they mean – has been unravelled by analysing electrical signals from people's brains while they recalled lists of words. Although the discovery cannot identify the individual words being filed, which could effectively make a very basic form of mind-reading possible, it does for the first time reveal the electrical circuitry vital for storing words according to what they mean, rather than where they came in a sequence, for example. "Our main focus is on how people organise their memories," says Jeremy Manning, currently at Princeton University. "So we looked at the degree to which people organised their memories according to the meanings of words." Calling Roget The researchers recruited 46 patients with epilepsy who had already had electrodes implanted in their brains for treatment purposes. The electrodes allowed the researchers to measure electrical activity in the brain as the participants viewed lists of 15 to 20 words. A minute later, the patients were asked to recall aloud as many as possible, in any order. Collectively, the participants viewed 1550 lists, including a total of 24,760 words. The researchers included within each list words with similar meanings or associations, such as "goose" and "duck", to see if recall of one prompted recollection of the other. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16987 - Posted: 06.30.2012

Learn to play piano in your sleep

By Laura Sanders A dreamland ditty played softly during a nap helps people hit the right notes while awake. Soft tones during sleep creep into the napping brain and strengthen playing skills, researchers report online June 24 in Nature Neuroscience. The results don’t mean that after a nighttime Beethoven sonata, a piano novice will wake up with the ability to play it. But the results do suggest that an existing skill can be sharpened during a nap, says study coauthor Ken Paller of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Earlier work by Paller and others has found that sound and odor cues during sleep can improve a person’s memory for the locations of objects. The new study extends those results by showing that a learned skill — in this instance, playing music — can also be influenced during sleep. Although these sorts of experiments are just getting started, “the door is wide open,” Paller says. Musical ability, athletic prowess and other talents that normally require a lot of practice may be amenable to boosts during sleep. Before the easy job of having a nap, 16 right-handed participants in the study had to do some actual work. Volunteers learned two different not-very-catchy tunes, played with their left hands on the a, s, d and f keys of a computer. In an arrangement similar to that of Guitar Hero, circles that floated up the screen told participants which key to hit and when. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16963 - Posted: 06.25.2012

Your sweet tooth might be making you stupid

By Madeline Haller Prepping for a big presentation but can't seem to remember any of the content? Blame your sweet tooth. A diet high in sugar may hamper your memory and ability to learn, says a study published in the Journal of Physiology. Researchers had two groups of rats drink water mixed with fructose, a type of sugar. One of the groups also received omega-3 fatty acids as a part of their diet. After 6 weeks, the rats who drank only sugar water completed a maze slower than the omega-3-fed mice. (We know you're not a mouse -- but you can still take steps to navigate the maze of life. Check out these 27 Ways to Power Up Your Brain.) Not only were they slower in the maze, the rats who drank only sugar water had higher triglyceride, glucose, and insulin levels. It appears that they entered a state of insulin resistance, which is where the hormone insulin becomes less effective at lowering your blood sugar, says Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, Ph.D., lead study author and a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Here's how it works: Insulin, in addition to controlling blood sugar, also influences the ways in which your brain cells operate. And within the hippocampus -- the part of the brain responsible for short-term and long-term memory -- insulin signaling actually facilitates memory. Therefore, an insulin resistance may be what's causing a disruption in the rats' ability to recall the route they'd learned 6 weeks ago, the researchers hypothesize. © 2012 msnbc.com

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of Internal States
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 16959 - Posted: 06.25.2012

Color this chimp amazing

By Laura Sanders In what seems like a blow for humanity, a very smart chimpanzee in Japan crushes any human challenger at a number memory game. After the numbers 1 through 9 make a split-second appearance on a computer screen, the chimp, Ayumu, gets to work. His bulky index finger flies gracefully across the screen, tapping white squares where the numbers had appeared, in order. So far, no human has topped him. Ayumu’s talent caused a stir when researchers first reported it in 2007 (SN: 12/8/2007, p. 355). Since then, the chimp’s feat has grown legendary, even earning him a starring role in a recent BBC documentary. But psychologist Nicholas Humphrey says the hype may be overblown. In an upcoming Trends in Cognitive Sciences essay, Humphrey floats a different explanation for Ayumu’s superlative performance, one that leaves humans’ memory skills unimpugned: Ayumu might have a curious brain condition that allows him to see numbers in colors. If Humphrey’s wild idea is right, the chimpanzee’s feat has nothing to do with memory. “When you get extraordinary results, you need to look for extraordinary ideas to explain them,” says Humphrey, of Darwin College at Cambridge University in England. The idea came to him after listening to two presentations at a consciousness conference in 2011. Tetsuro Matsuzawa of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University in Japan described his research on the memory skills of Ayumu, his mother Ai, and two other mom-offspring pairs. And neuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston talked about the brain condition known as synesthesia, which causes people to attach sensory experiences to letters or numbers. A synesthete might always see the number four as blue, for instance. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 16918 - Posted: 06.16.2012

The Makings of Our Earliest Memories

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. Like many other pediatricians, I do not wear a white coat. Many of us believe that babies and small children suffer from a special form of “white coat syndrome,” that mix of trepidation and anxiety that some adults experience — to the point of high blood pressure — in a medical setting. The pediatric version is easy to diagnose: Doctor in white coat walks into room, kid starts to cry. I worry that a child like this has recalled shots or an unpleasant ear check and has connected that memory to a particular garment, rather than to my face, or my exam room, or my stethoscope. But how realistic is that? Do babies remember past events? Starting when? Recent investigations of memory formation raise fascinating questions about how young children store and retrieve experiences and information. In some ways, I believe we tend to exalt the memory-related feats of the infant and the toddler. True, they can learn language, even more than one; sorting out words and syntax from the surrounding noise is in many ways a defining human use of memory. Nora Newcombe, a professor of psychology at Temple University, points out that there may be evolutionary reasons that this kind of memory — semantic memory — is so strong in the early years of life, when babies are faced with learning so many facts about the world. And yet, every adult lacks memories from the very early years. Freud called it “infantile amnesia,” describing “the peculiar amnesia which veils from most people (not from all!) the first years of their childhood.” Not surprisingly, he felt we repress those early childhood memories because they contain the beginnings of sexual feeling. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Science's Long—and Successful—Search for Where Memory Lives

by Dan Hurley Marilyn  Monroe and Jane Russell appeared  outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre  to write their names and leave imprints  of their hands and high heels in the  wet concrete. Down on their knees,  supported by a velvet-covered pillow for their elbows, they wrote “Gentlemen  Prefer Blondes” in looping script, followed by their signatures and the date, 6-26-53. But how did those watching the  events of that day manage to imprint a memory trace of it, etching the details with neurons and synapses in the soft cement of the brain? Where and how are those memories written, and what is the molecular alphabet that spells out the  rich recollections of color, smell, and sound? After more than a century of searching, an answer was recently found, strangely enough, just eight miles from Grauman’s. Although not located on any tourist map, the scene of the discovery can be reached easily from Hollywood Boulevard by heading west on Sunset to the campus of UCLA. There, amid one of the densest clusters of neuroscience research facilities in the world, stands the Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center. And sitting at a table in the building’s first-floor restaurant, the Café Synapse, is the neuroscientist who has come closer than anyone ever thought possible to finding the place where memories are written in the brain. That spot, the physical substrate of a particular memory, has long been known in brain research as an engram. Decades of scientific dogma asserted that engrams exist only in vast webs of connections, not in a particular place but in distributed neural networks running widely through the brain. Yet a series of pioneering studies have demonstrated that it is possible to lure specific memories into particular neurons, at least in mice. If those neurons are killed or temporarily inactivated, the memories vanish. If the neurons are reactivated, the memories return. These same studies have also begun to explain how and why the brain allocates each memory to a particular group of cells and how it links them together and organizes them—the physical means by which the scent of a madeleine, the legendary confection that sparked Marcel Proust’s memory stream, leads to remembrance of things past. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16895 - Posted: 06.11.2012

Chickadees get smarter as they move up mountains

by Zoë Corbyn If you want to enhance your memory, consider moving up a mountain. The spatial recall of mountain chickadees – tiny songbirds that inhabit high regions of the western US – is better the higher up they live. Vladimir Pravosudov of the University of Nevada, in Reno, and his colleagues collected 48 juvenile birds (Poecile gambeli) from three different elevations in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Chickadees that lived just 600 metres higher than others had larger hippocampi – a part of the brain strongly linked to memory. Not only that, they were also better at remembering where food was hidden in lab tests. It makes sense that birds living higher up would have a better memory, says Pravosudov. Mountain chickadees are "scatter hoarders", storing their favourite winter food of pine seeds in thousands of different spots among the trees. At higher altitudes, where it stays cold for longer, birds must store more seeds, and remember where they cached them. The effect could apply to other scatter-hoarding species, says Pravosudov, though he rules out most squirrels and rodents, which are either not active during the winter or put everything in one place and so do not need a better memory. Could global warming change things? Very possibly. "The selection pressure that the winter provides will be less, so the birds are going to get dumber," says Pravosudov. Time to consider a simpler pantry? Journal reference: Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.04.018 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 0: ; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16867 - Posted: 06.02.2012

Why Is Memory So Good and So Bad?

By Julian De Freitas What did you eat for dinner one week ago today? Chances are, you can’t quite recall. But for at least a short while after your meal, you knew exactly what you ate, and could easily remember what was on your plate in great detail. What happened to your memory between then and now? Did it slowly fade away? Or did it vanish, all at once? Memories of visual images (e.g., dinner plates) are stored in what is called visual memory. Our minds use visual memory to perform even the simplest of computations; from remembering the face of someone we’ve just met, to remembering what time it was last we checked. Without visual memory, we wouldn’t be able to store—and later retrieve—anything we see. Just as a computer’s memory capacity constrains its abilities, visual memory capacity has been correlated with a number of higher cognitive abilities, including academic success, fluid intelligence (the ability to solve novel problems), and general comprehension. For many reasons, then, it would be very useful to understand how visual memory facilitates these mental operations, as well as constrains our ability to perform them. Yet although these big questions have long been debated, we are only now beginning to answer them. Memories like what you had for dinner are stored in visual short-term memory—particularly, in a kind of short-term memory often called “visual working memory.” Visual working memory is where visual images are temporarily stored while your mind works away at other tasks—like a whiteboard on which things are briefly written and then wiped away. We rely on visual working memory when remembering things over brief intervals, such as when copying lecture notes to a notebook. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16853 - Posted: 05.31.2012

Old and New Neurons Trade Roles to Aid Memory

By Meehan Crist For decades researchers have known that our ability to remember everyday experiences depends on a slender belt of brain tissue called the hippocampus. Basic memory functions, such as forming new memories and recalling old ones, were thought to be performed along this belt by different sets of neurons. Now findings suggest that the same neurons in fact perform both these very different functions, changing from one role to another as they age. The vast majority of these hippocampal neurons, called granule cells, develop when we are very young and remain in place throughout our lives. But about 5 percent develop in adulthood through the birth of new neurons, a process known as neurogenesis. Young granule cells help form new memories, but as they get older they switch roles to helping recall the past. Newer granule cells pick up the slack, taking on the role of helping to form new memories. Susumu Tonegawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues published the findings on March 30 in the journal Cell. Tonegawa’s team tested the role of these adult-born cells by genetically engineering mice in which the old cells could be selectively turned off. They then put the mice through a series of mazes and fear-conditioning tests, which demonstrated that young granule cells are essential to forming separate memories of similar events, whereas old granule cells are essential to recalling past events based on small cues. This discovery suggests that memory impairments common in aging and in post-traumatic stress disorder may be connected to an imbalance of old and new cells. “If you don’t have a normal amount of young cells, you may have a problem distinguishing between two events that would be seen as different by healthy people,” Tonegawa says. At the same time, the presence of too many old cells would make it easier to recall traumatic past experiences based on current cues. © 2012 Scientific American,

Mind-Pops: Psychologists Begin to Study an Unusual form of Proustian Memory

By Ferris Jabr Lia Kvavilashvili sat in her office at the University of Hertfordshire, mentally reviewing a study she had recently published. She knew that there was a particular statistical measure that might have been useful in the study, but she could not remember its name. Frustrated, she got up to make a cup of tea. Suddenly the word "hurdle" popped into her mind, unannounced, uninvited. Kvavilashvili—who grew up in Georgia speaking Georgian, Russian and Estonian, and only started to learn English at age 13—had no idea what "hurdle" meant. She looked it up in her dictionary. The second definition was underlined. Although she had no conscious recollection of it, Kvavilashvili had evidently looked up the meaning of "hurdle" before. Somehow, she concluded, her subconscious knew that the word was relevant to her difficulty remembering the name of the useful statistical measure. She had just experienced what she and a few other psychologists call "mind-pops"—fragments of knowledge, such as words, images or melodies that drop suddenly and unexpectedly into consciousness. In most cases, mind-pops seem completely irrelevant to the moments in time and thought into which they intrude. But Kvavilashvili is discovering that mind-pops are not truly random—they are linked to our experiences and knowledge of the world, albeit with hidden threads. Research on mind-pops is preliminary, but so far studies suggest that the phenomenon is genuine and common. Some people notice their mind-pops far more often than others and frequent mind-popping could quicken problem solving and boost creativity. However, in some people's minds—such as those with schizophrenia—mind-pops might evolve from benign phenomena into unsettling hallucinations. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16839 - Posted: 05.24.2012

Finches learn even when practice isn't perfect

Mo Costandi Birds can master new skills without the gradual improvements that normally occur with training. The improvement is all down to an ancient part of the brain that is present in all vertebrate species. Learning complex motor skills such as speech or dance movements involves imitation and trial and error. Young songbirds, for example, learn to sing by copying an adult tutor, and practising the song thousands of times until they have perfected every syllable. The underlying brain mechanisms are unknown, but one influential model states that structures called the basal ganglia generate a variety of movement patterns that are tried out by the motor cortex, which executes the movements. The basal ganglia then reinforce the best pattern by transmitting a rewarding dopamine signal after receiving feedback on the result of the movement from the motor cortex. But research published today in Nature challenges this view. Jonathan Charlesworth, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues trained Bengalese finches (Lonchura striata domestica) to modify the pitch of one song syllable in response to white noise. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 16821 - Posted: 05.21.2012

Are Sweets Making You Stupid?

Analysis by Sheila Eldred What you eat may affect how you learn, say UCLA researchers in a new study on the effects of high fructose corn syrup and omega-3 fatty acids on the behavior of rats. Rats that were fed only high fructose corn syrup and standard rat chow had more trouble navigating a maze at the end of six weeks than rats who were fed a diet supplemented with omega-3 fatty acids, according to results published in the Journal of Physiology. "Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think," said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery and integrative biology and physiology. "Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage." The animals trained on a maze with visual landmarks twice daily for five days before starting the experimental diet. Six weeks later, the researchers tested the rats' ability to recall the route and escape the maze. "The second group of rats navigated the maze much faster than the rats that did not receive omega-3 fatty acids," Gomez-Pinilla said. "The DHA-deprived animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity. Their brain cells had trouble signaling each other, disrupting the rats' ability to think clearly and recall the route they'd learned six weeks earlier." The faster rats received omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which protects against damage to the brain's synapses, or chemical connections. The DHA-deprived rats also developed signs of resistance to insulin. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Awake mental replay of past experiences critical for learning

Awake mental replay of past experiences is essential for making informed choices, suggests a study in rats. Without it, the animals’ memory-based decision-making faltered, say scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers blocked learning from, and acting on, past experience by selectively suppressing replay — encoded as split-second bursts of neuronal activity in the memory hubs of rats performing a maze task. "It appears to be these ripple-like bursts in electrical activity in the hippocampus that enable us to think about future possibilities based on past experiences and decide what to do," explained Loren Frank, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco. "Similar patterns of hippocampus activity have been detected in humans during similar situations." Frank, Shantanu Jadhav, Ph.D., and colleagues, report on their discovery online in the journal Science, Thursday, May 3, 2012. "These results add to evidence that the brain encodes information not only in the amount of neuronal activity, but that its rhythm and synchronicity also play a crucial role," said Bettina Osborn, Ph.D., of the NIMH Division of Neuroscience and Basic Behavioral Science, which funded the research. Frank and colleagues had discovered in previous studies that the rhythmic ripple-like activity in the hippocampus coincided with awake mental replay of past experiences, which occurs during lulls in the rats' activity. The same signal during sleep is known to help consolidate memories.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16766 - Posted: 05.08.2012

On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik

By Maria Konnikova In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could only remember orders that were in progress. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory. Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would: she went back to the lab and designed a study. A group of adults and children was given anywhere between 18 and 22 tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles)—only, half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks far better than the completed ones—over two times better, in fact. Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a state of tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending: your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working – and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls this a Need for Closure, a desire of our minds to end states of uncertainty and resolve unfinished business. This need motivates us to work harder, to work better, and to work to completion. It adds impetus to minds that may otherwise be too busy or oversaturated to bother with the details. In other words, it ensures that those orders will stay in the waiters’ heads until it is certain that your food will hit the table as promised. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16729 - Posted: 05.01.2012

How Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS The value of mental-training games may be speculative, as Dan Hurley writes in his article on the quest to make ourselves smarter, but there is another, easy-to-achieve, scientifically proven way to make yourself smarter. Go for a walk or a swim. For more than a decade, neuroscientists and physiologists have been gathering evidence of the beneficial relationship between exercise and brainpower. But the newest findings make it clear that this isn’t just a relationship; it is the relationship. Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons — and the makeup of brain matter itself — scientists in just the past few months have discovered that exercise appears to build a brain that resists physical shrinkage and enhance cognitive flexibility. Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does. The most persuasive evidence comes from several new studies of lab animals living in busy, exciting cages. It has long been known that so-called “enriched” environments — homes filled with toys and engaging, novel tasks — lead to improvements in the brainpower of lab animals. In most instances, such environmental enrichment also includes a running wheel, because mice and rats generally enjoy running. Until recently, there was little research done to tease out the particular effects of running versus those of playing with new toys or engaging the mind in other ways that don’t increase the heart rate. So, last year a team of researchers led by Justin S. Rhodes, a psychology professor at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, gathered four groups of mice and set them into four distinct living arrangements. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 16691 - Posted: 04.23.2012

Spine Tuning: Finding Physical Evidence of How Practice Rewires the Brain

By Ferris Jabr In kindergarten, several of my friends and I were very serious about learning to tie our shoes. I remember sitting on the edge of the playground, looping laces into bunny ears and twisting them into a knot over and over again until I had it just right. A few years later, whistling became my new challenge. On the car ride to school or walking between classes, I puckered my lips and blew, shifting my tongue like rudder to direct the air. Finally, after weeks of nothing but tuneless wooshing, I whistled my first note. Although I had no inkling of it at the time, my persistence rewired my brain. Just about everything we do modifies connections between brain cells—learning and memory are dependent on this flexibility. When we improve a skill through practice, we strengthen connections between neurons involved in that skill. In a recent study, scientists peeked into the brains of living mice as the rodents learned some new tricks. Mice who repeated the same task day after day grew more clusters of mushroomlike appendages on their neurons than mice who divided their attention among different tasks. In essence, the scientists observed a physical trace of practice in the brain. Yi Zuo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues studied how neurons changed in the brains of three groups of mice that learned different kinds of behaviors over four days, as well as a fourth group of mice that went about business as usual, learning nothing new. Of the three learning groups, the first practiced the same task each day, learning how to stretch their paws through gaps in a Plexiglass cage to get a tasty seed just within reach. The second group practiced two tasks: reaching for a seed and learning how to eat slippery bits of capellini, a very thin pasta. Each day mice in the third group played in a cage outfitted with a different set of toys, such as ropes, ladders and mesh on which to scamper and climb. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16665 - Posted: 04.17.2012

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