By Ferris Jabr In search of nectar, a honeybee flies into a well-manicured suburban garden and lands on one of several camellia bushes planted in a row. After rummaging through the ruffled pink petals of several flowers, the bee leaves the first bush for another. Finding hardly any nectar in the flowers of the second bush, the bee flies to a third. And so on. Our brains may have evolved to forage for some kinds of memories in the same way, shifting our attention from one cluster of stored information to another depending on what each patch has to offer. Recently, Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick in England and his colleagues found experimental evidence for this potential parallel. "Memory foraging" is only one way of thinking about memory—and it does not apply universally to all types of information retained in the brain—but, so far, the analogy seems to work well for particular cases of active remembering. Hills and his colleagues asked 141 Indiana University Bloomington students to type the names of as many animals as they could think of in three minutes. For decades, psychologists have used such "verbal fluency tasks" to study memory and diseases in which memory breaks down, such as Alzheimer's and dementia. Again and again, researchers have found that people name animals—or vegetables or movies—in clusters of related items. They might start out saying "cat, dog, goldfish, hamster"—animals kept as pets—and then, having exhausted that subcategory, move onto ocean animals: "dolphin, whale, shark, octopus." © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16664 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By Laura Sanders In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, scientists erase troubling memories from Jim Carrey’s head. In real life, scientists have done the opposite. By reactivating certain nerve cells, researchers make artificial memories pop into mice’s heads. The results, published in the March 23 Science and online March 22 in Nature, offer a deeper understanding of how the brain creates and uses memories. Much of what scientists know about how the brain remembers comes from studies that look for signs of natural memories in the brain or that disrupt memories. In the new work, memories are actually created, says neuroscientist Richard Morris of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “To my mind, this is an extremely important step forward,” he says. Though the two teams used different approaches, they both created a false memory of a fearful situation in mice. In the work reported in Science, neuroscientist Mark Mayford and colleagues relied on a molecule that, upon binding a particular drug, could activate nerve cells. The team genetically engineered the mice so that only the nerve cells active during the formation of a particular memory would make the molecule. In a sense, this molecule acts as a trail of bread crumbs in a forest, marking cells in the brain that make a memory and allowing scientists to reactivate those cells later. The marked memory was of a square room with opaque white walls and floor, and no particular odors. The mice played in this room, had their memory tagged and later went into a different room — this time, a wintergreen-scented room with a black-and-white checkered wall and a gridded floor. Here, the animals were subjected to shocks. After a while, the animals learned to freeze in response to being in the room. © 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: 16567 - Posted: 03.24.2012

By Laura Sanders As anyone who has typed an outdated e-mail password before finally dredging up the new one knows, it’s easy to remember the wrong thing. Now, by capturing the battle between right and wrong memories in the brain, scientists have found that the struggle can get messy. The results, published March 7 in the Journal of Neuroscience, bring scientists closer to understanding how people usually manage to pull up the right memory, and what goes wrong when this process fails. “To me, one of the most remarkable things isn’t how much we store in memory, but how well we’re able to find a memory,” says study coauthor Brice Kuhl of Yale University. To study this battle of new versus old memories in the brain, Kuhl and his team had 24 undergraduates learn a picture-word pair, then learn a different one and finally describe the more recent pair. To create the original memory, participants were twice shown a word above an unrelated picture of a face, an object or a scene. For instance, the word “swim” would appear over a picture of Al Gore. The researchers then shuffled the association, replacing Gore with an image of the Grand Canyon, and showed the participants the new pair. While in a brain scanner, participants were then shown the word “swim” and asked what kind of picture went underneath it in the newer memory. © 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: 16485 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Jonah Lehrer In Proust Was A Neuroscientist, I argued that, even in this age of glittering science, we still have a deep need for the musings and mysteries of art: We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us to how live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse “negative capability.” He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had “the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art. I went on to (grandiosely) propose the formation of a fourth culture, which would “freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience.” There are many wonderful examples of such works, from the novels of Richard Powers to the mathematical essays of David Foster Wallace. And this brings me to Charles Fernyhough, a science writer, novelist and academic psychologist. His most recent project is A Box of Birds, a novel that explicitly attempts to explore the impact of neuroscience on our self-conception. Here’s how Charles summarizes his goals for the fictional work: © 2012 Condé Nast Digital.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16483 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS At 82, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Eric R. Kandel is still constantly coming up with new ideas for research. This winter, he has been working on a project that he hopes will lead to a new class of drugs for treating schizophrenia. Last year he collaborated, for the first time, with Denise B. Kandel — his fellow Columbia University research scientist and wife of 55 years — investigating the biological links between cigarette and cocaine addiction. And this month his newest book, “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present,” is to be released by Random House. A condensed and edited version of our two interviews follows. As in his new book, the conversation begins with memories of Vienna, his birthplace. How old were you when the Nazis marched into Vienna? I was 8 ½. Immediately, we saw that our lives were in danger. We were completely abandoned by our non-Jewish friends and neighbors. No one spoke to me in school. One boy walked up to me and said, “My father said I’m not to speak to you anymore.” When we went to the park, we were roughed up. Then, on Nov. 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, we were booted out of our apartment, which was looted. We knew we had to get out. Fortunately, my mother had the foresight to apply for visas to the United States earlier. For more than a year, we waited in the terror of Vienna for our immigration quota number to come up. When it finally did, my older brother, Ludwig, and I made the Atlantic crossing alone. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16481 - Posted: 03.06.2012

A repression of gene activity in the brain appears to be an early event affecting people with Alzheimer's disease, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have found. In mouse models of Alzheimer's disease, this epigenetic blockade and its effects on memory were treatable. "These findings provide a glimpse of the brain shutting down the ability to form new memories gene by gene in Alzheimer's disease, and offer hope that we may be able to counteract this process," said Roderick Corriveau, Ph.D., a program director at NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), which helped fund the research. The study was led by Li-Huei Tsai, Ph.D., who is director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. It was published online February 29 in Nature. Dr. Tsai and her team found that a protein called histone deacetylase 2 (HDAC2) accumulates in the brain early in the course of Alzheimer's disease in mouse models and in people with the disease. HDAC2 is known to tighten up spools of DNA, effectively locking down the genes within and reducing their activity, or expression. In the mice, the increase in HDAC2 appears to produce a blockade of genes involved in learning and memory. Preventing the build-up of HDAC2 protected the mice from memory loss.

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: 16464 - Posted: 03.01.2012

By Laura Sanders Of the 100,000 nerve cells in the fruit fly brain, two have a special role in memory. Positioned on the front of the brain, one on each side, this duo of nerve cells (shown in pink) churns out proteins that are essential for fruit flies to form, store and retrieve long-term memories, Chun-Chao Chen of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and colleagues report in the Feb. 10 Science. When the researchers prevented these two nerve cells from making proteins after a training session, the flies’ ability to remember an odor diminished. Surprisingly, these two large nerve cells, called the dorsal-anterior-lateral neurons, reside outside brain regions that are typically thought of as the fruit fly’s memory centers — L-shaped structures called the mushroom bodies (shown in green). © 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: 16377 - Posted: 02.14.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY Scientists have for the first time improved memory by applying direct electrical stimulation to a key area in the brain as it learns its way around a new environment. The study included delivery of electrical currents to the entorhinal cortex of the brain. The stimulation, delivered through electrodes inserted into the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, sharply improved performance on a virtual driving game that tests spatial memory, the neural mapping ability that allows people to navigate a new city without a GPS. Experts said that the new study, appearing Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, was tantalizing but not yet conclusive, because the number of patients tested — six — was small, and the biological effects of electrical stimulation are still poorly understood. But it comes at a time of growing excitement in the study of memory and its disorders; only last week, researchers reported strong evidence that damage associated with Alzheimer’s disease spreads through the brain — beginning in the same area targeted in the new study. “People should run to replicate this study, because the implications are incredibly exciting, both for understanding the mechanism for encoding new memories, and ultimately for the treatment of neurological diseases” like dementias, said Michael J. Kahana, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16358 - Posted: 02.09.2012

by Sally Adee Whether you want to smash a forehand like Federer, or just be an Xbox hero, there is a shocking short cut to getting the brain of an expert I'm close to tears behind my thin cover of sandbags as 20 screaming, masked men run towards me at full speed, strapped into suicide bomb vests and clutching rifles. For every one I manage to shoot dead, three new assailants pop up from nowhere. I'm clearly not shooting fast enough, and panic and incompetence are making me continually jam my rifle. My salvation lies in the fact that my attackers are only a video, projected on screens to the front and sides. It's the very simulation that trains US troops to take their first steps with a rifle, and everything about it has been engineered to feel like an overpowering assault. But I am failing miserably. In fact, I'm so demoralised that I'm tempted to put down the rifle and leave. Then they put the electrodes on me. I am in a lab in Carlsbad, California, in pursuit of an elusive mental state known as "flow" - that feeling of effortless concentration that characterises outstanding performance in all kinds of skills. Flow has been maddeningly difficult to pin down, let alone harness, but a wealth of new technologies could soon allow us all to conjure up this state. The plan is to provide a short cut to virtuosity, slashing the amount of time it takes to master a new skill - be it tennis, playing the piano or marksmanship. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16354 - Posted: 02.07.2012

By Gary Stix What if a drug could improve learning and cognition and had no untoward medical consequences? Wouldn’t it be justified to make it widely available? A group of scientists concluded three years ago that it would be. No such drug exists, but the question arises anew because of a brain-stimulation technique that appears on paper to fit the bill. The technology, transcranial direct-current stimulation, involves applying weak electrical currents to the scalp through electrodes. It appears to alter brain activity in a long-lasting way that can enhance cognition. Electrical therapies for the nervous system have a lengthy history. In about 45 AD, the Roman physician Scribonius Largus helped relieve pain by applying electric fish to a patient’s skin. Simple electric stimulation to the scalp appears to have myriad effects, possibly improving motor skills, vision, decision-making, problem-solving attention and mathematical reasoning in healthy individuals. “Where can I get one?” you might ask. Take your choice. You might buy one for less than $1,000. Or you could make your own: it’s really just a 9-volt battery with a few electrodes, seemingly the perfect high-school science project. Seems too good to be true. Let’s go now to the ethicists. “Is anything wrong with this picture?” asks an article in press in Current Biology. [Accessible as a PDF through an Oxford University science blog.] The authors, Roi Cohen Kadosh and a group of scientists and ethicists mostly from Oxford University, note that the electrical brain stimulator really does appear to be pretty safe in healthy adults: there are no reports of seizures, one of the first concerns for any intervention that turns up the volume on neural circuits. © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16353 - Posted: 02.07.2012

KANSAS CITY, MO – Memories in our brains are maintained by connections between neurons called “synapses”. But how do these synapses stay strong and keep memories alive for decades? Neuroscientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have discovered a major clue from a study in fruit flies: Hardy, self-copying clusters or oligomers of a synapse protein are an essential ingredient for the formation of long-term memory. The finding supports a surprising new theory about memory, and may have a profound impact on explaining other oligomer-linked functions and diseases in the brain, including Alzheimer’s disease and prion diseases. “Self-sustaining populations of oligomers located at synapses may be the key to the long-term synaptic changes that underlie memory; in fact, our finding hints that oligomers play a wider role in the brain than has been thought,” says Kausik Si, Ph.D., an associate investigator at the Stowers Institute, and senior author of the new study, which is published in the January 27, 2012 online issue of the journal Cell. Si’s investigations in this area began nearly a decade ago during his doctoral research in the Columbia University laboratory of Nobel-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. He found that in the sea slug Aplysia californica, which has long been favored by neuroscientists for memory experiments because of its large, easily-studied neurons, a synapse-maintenance protein known as CPEB (Cytoplasmic Polyadenylation Element Binding protein) has an unexpected property. SciTechDaily Copyright © 1998 - 2012.

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: 16316 - Posted: 01.30.2012

By Morgen Peck When we drive somewhere new, we navigate by referring to a two-dimensional map that accounts for distances only on a horizontal plane. According to research published online in August in Nature Neuroscience, the mammalian brain seems to do the same, collapsing the world into a flat plane even as the animal skitters up trees and slips deep into burrows. “Our subjective sense that our map is three-dimensional is illusory,” says Kathryn Jeffery, a behavioral neuroscientist at University College London who led the research. Jeffery studies a collection of neurons in and around the rat hippo­campus that build an internal representation of space. As the animal travels, these neurons, called grid cells and place cells, respond uniquely to distance, turning on and off in a way that measures how far the animal has moved in a particular direction. Past research has focused on how these cartographic cells encode two-dimensional space. Jeffery and her col­leagues decided to look at how they respond to changes in altitude. To do this, they enticed rats to climb up a spiral staircase while the scientists collected electrical recordings from single cells. The firing pattern encoded very little in­formation about height. The finding adds evidence for the hypothesis that the brain keeps track of our location on a flat plane, which is defined by the way the body is oriented. If a squirrel, say, is running along the ground, then scampers straight up a tree, its internal two-dimensional map simply shifts from the horizontal plane to the vertical. © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16312 - Posted: 01.30.2012

by Elsa Youngsteadt The temperature of a nest can affect a hatchling lizard's size, speed, and sex. Now, the reptiles can add smarts to the list. Researchers have found that lizards incubated in warmer environments may learn faster than others. The results are preliminary, but they suggest that a hotter climate could give some lizards a cognitive edge, potentially helping them escape predators. Among the species poised to sharpen up is the three-lined skink (Bassiana duperreyi), a small, bug-eating lizard native to southeast Australia. The female skinks lay clusters of eggs under sunny rocks and logs, and their nests are heating up. University of Sydney herpetologist Richard Shine and his colleagues found that between 1997 and 2006, the lizards' nest temperatures increased by about 1.5°C—despite females' tendency to dig deeper nests and lay eggs earlier in the spring. Lizard moms might do well to accept the climbing temperatures—at least for now. Nests at the hot end of normal are more likely to produce fast-running hatchlings with an even sex ratio. (Cooler nests have more males, which are hardier in the cold—but an equal ratio could lead to more baby lizards overall.) Joshua Amiel, a Ph.D. student in Shine's lab, wondered if the warmer embryos' brains might develop differently, too. He collected wild females and nestled their eggs in individual glass dishes of sand and vermiculite (a common potting mix ingredient). Half went to a warm chamber with an average temperature of 22°C, the others to an incubator averaging 16°C, until they hatched. © 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: 16245 - Posted: 01.12.2012

By Jason G. Goldman Classical conditioning is one of those introductory psychology terms that gets thrown around. Many people have a general idea that it is one of the most basic forms of associative learning, and people often know that Ivan Pavlov’s 1927 experiment with dogs has something to do with it, but that is often where it ends. The most important thing to remember is that classical conditioning involves automatic or reflexive responses, and not voluntary behavior (that’s operant conditioning, and that is a different post). What does this mean? For one thing, that means that the only responses that can be elicited out of a classical conditioning paradigm are ones that rely on responses that are naturally made by the animal (or human) that is being trained. Also, it means that the response you hope to elicit must occur below the level of conscious awareness – for example, salivation, nausea, increased or decreased heartrate, pupil dilation or constriction, or even a reflexive motor response (such as recoiling from a painful stimulus). In other words, these sorts of responses are involuntary. The basic classical conditioning procedure goes like this: a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditional stimulus (UCS). The neutral stimulus can be anything, as long as it does not provoke any sort of response in the organism. On the other hand, the unconditional stimulus is something that reliably results in a natural response. For example, if you shine a light into a human eye, the pupil will automatically constrict (you can actually see this happen if you watch your eyes in a mirror as you turn on and off a light). Pavlov called this the “unconditional response.” (UCR) © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16244 - Posted: 01.12.2012

By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News Nicotine patches may improve the memory of elderly people experiencing the earliest symptoms of dementia, researchers suspect. The patches appear to give a cognitive boost to people with mild memory impairment. The findings, published in the journal Neurology, come from a small study of 67 people over a period of six months. Experts say the results are not conclusive, merely hinting of a benefit and do not mean people should smoke. The health risks of smoking massively outweigh any potential nicotine benefits. And nicotine is known to be addictive. Longer and larger studies are now needed to fully assess nicotine's effect on memory and whether it might point the way to new treatments for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, they say. There are some 820,000 people in the UK living with dementia. Although some drugs are already available that can lessen some of the symptoms of the disease, there is no cure for this progressive disorder. Memory and cognition are some of the first functions that begin to fail in a person with dementia. BBC © 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16231 - Posted: 01.10.2012

By Gary Stix High-school and college teachers always entreat their charges to forgo the cramming. Studying bit by bit over the course of a semester is the way to go. A study published online in Nature Neuroscience on December 25 not only appears to demonstrate the biological underpinnings of this pedagogical truism. It actually goes one step further to suggest a means of optimizing training intervals, an insight that could, in theory, translate into strategies for committing to memory the molecular structure of maitotoxin or a Chinese ideogram. The study is not about to spur a round of venture financing for the next start-up to launch a new generation of brain-training games. At the moment, it is still just a proof of principle in Aplysia californica, the sea slugs that are star animals in the laboratories of neuroscientists. Eric Kandel, the avuncular regular on the Charlie Rose Brain Series, actually rode the back of Aplysia to a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his research on the biochemical processes underlying memory. In this new study, Kandel's former student, John H. Byrne, who heads the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, has brought a new twist to the original learning method developed in Kandel's lab—a technique that consisted of shocking slug tails at regular intervals and then seeing whether the animals overreacted later when receiving another zap, a sign that they remembered their tormentors all too well. © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16224 - Posted: 01.07.2012

By Laura Sanders Sea snails learn more effectively on an oddly timed series of training sessions rather than regularly spaced lessons, a new study finds. If the results extend to humans, they might suggest ways of improving students’ study habits. The work, published online December 25 in Nature Neuroscience, shows how a deep knowledge of biology and powerful computer models can lead to insights about the brain, says neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University, who won a Nobel prize in 2000 for his work on sea snail memory. When the rat-sized Aplysia californica receives an unpleasant shock, it retracts its gill and an appendage called a siphon. After numerous shocks, it will become sensitized, learning to retract the siphon and keep it in for a while. Scientists normally expose sea snails to the signal at regular intervals over several hours to sensitize the animals. But Jack Byrne of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and colleagues wondered whether there was a better way. “There’s no real logic for why people use one protocol over another, other than it works,” he says. Kandel and others have worked out a lot of the biochemical details of how sea snails learn and form memories. When the creatures start to learn something, two major molecular cascades kick off in nerve cells. Genes jump into action, churning out proteins that then spur other genes into action. One of these cascades happens quickly, and the other one is sluggish, but both need to deliver their products at the same time for a memory to stick. Y. Zhang et al. Computational design of enhanced learning protocols. Nature Neuroscience. Published online December 25, 2011. doi: 10.1038/nn.2990. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

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: 16185 - Posted: 12.27.2011

By Gary Stix Lawyers and philosophers have already begun debating the ethical implications of an incipient future in which a memory is simply overwritten as if it were a digital file destined for the trash icon on your desktop. Biologists who still work with mice and other living things that don’t function like four-legged flash drives are often left to simply roll their eyes. On Friday, SUNY Downstate’s Symposium on Neuroethics of Memory illustrated the lingering disparity between the two cultures, as C.P. Snow might have phrased it. David Wasserman, the director of research at the Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University, raised the issue of when it might be appropriate to implant a “prosthetic” memory to enhance the verisimilitude in recalling a grandparent whose memory had faded into near oblivion. After hearing this, David Glanzman, a researcher at UCLA who works on testing whether old memories can be damped down in sea slugs, pointed out a couple of oft-cited figures: the human brain has 100 billion neurons, each of which typically extends 10,000 connections to other neurons. Identifying the location of a specific memory to delete would be an overwhelming challenge. Integrating a new memory of grandma into this dense web of neural wiring would be a graduate project for the year 2250 or beyond. “It’s hard for me to understand how you’d add specific memories,” Glanzman commented. “That seems to me impossibly hard.” Downstate had good reason to consider organizing such a conference, however. One researcher there, Todd Sacktor, has done pioneering studies of a biomolecule known as PKMzeta, which serves as a kind of memory preservative. Once a memory is formed, PKMzeta ensures that it persists without degradation over the long haul. © 2011 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16163 - Posted: 12.19.2011

By Charles B. Brenner and Jeffrey M. Zacks The French poet Paul Valéry once said, “The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.” In that spirit, consider a situation many of us will find we know too well: You're sitting at your desk in your office at home. Digging for something under a stack of papers, you find a dirty coffee mug that’s been there so long it’s eligible for carbon dating. Better wash it. You pick up the mug, walk out the door of your office, and head toward the kitchen. By the time you get to the kitchen, though, you've forgotten why you stood up in the first place, and you wander back to your office, feeling a little confused—until you look down and see the cup. So there's the thing we know best: The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do. We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn’t pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn’t important enough. But a “completely different” idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame. The first part of their paper’s title sums it up: “Walking through doorways causes forgetting.” Gabriel Radvansky, Sabine Krawietz and Andrea Tamplin seated participants in front of a computer screen running a video game in which they could move around using the arrow keys. In the game, they would walk up to a table with a colored geometric solid sitting on it. Their task was to pick up the object and take it to another table, where they would put the object down and pick up a new one. Whichever object they were currently carrying was invisible to them, as if it were in a virtual backpack. © 2011 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16154 - Posted: 12.15.2011

By Sandra Upson If there is one general rule about the limitations of the human mind, it is that we are terrible at multitasking. The old phrase “united we stand, divided we fall” applies equally well to the mechanisms of attention as it does to a patriotic cause. When devoted to a single task, the brain excels; when several goals splinter its focus, errors become unavoidable. But clear exceptions challenge that general rule. Two weeks ago, thousands of computer game enthusiasts descended on a convention center in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, to observe some of these exceptions in action. They were attending the championships of one of the world’s hottest computer games, StarCraft 2. Hands fluttered over keyboards like hummingbirds mid-hover at about fifty computers set up in a dimly lit open hall. Players, many of whom flew in from South Korea to compete, vied to advance through their brackets to the finals. This game is no joke, with the prize money to prove it—$50,000 went to the winner, a 16-year-old Korean who goes by the name Leenock. The agility on display in Providence —as seen in the players’ multitasking, their nonstop decision-making, and the stunning speed of their fingers—has not gone unnoticed by cognitive scientists. For decades, a different game, chess, has held the exalted position of “the drosophila of cognitive science”—the model organism that scientists could poke and prod to learn what makes experts better than the rest of us. StarCraft 2, however, might be emerging as the rhesus macaque: its added complexity may confound researchers initially, but the answers could ultimately be more telling. © 2011 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16101 - Posted: 12.03.2011