Attention, college students cramming between midterms and finals: Binging on soda and sweets for as little as six weeks may make you stupid. A new UCLA rat study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows the brain, hampering memory and learning -- and how omega-3 fatty acids can counteract the disruption. The peer-reviewed Journal of Physiol... (read more)
Two research studies, co-led by UC Davis neurologist Charles DeCarli and conducted by an international team that included more than 80 scientists at 71 institutions in eight countries, has advanced understanding of the genetic components of Alzheimer's disease and of brain development. Both studies appear in the April 15 edition of the journal Nature Genetics. The first study, based on a genetic analysi... (read more)
For almost as long as women have been living beyond their childbearing years, many have complained about a mental "fog" that seems to descend at about the time of menopause. And you would think those complaints might prompt some smart scientist (a woman herself, perhaps) to seriously investigate those complaints. The questions most women would probably ask are not whether these complaints are real ... (read more)
Despite a century of research, memory encoding in the brain has remained mysterious. Neuronal synaptic connection strengths are involved, but synaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale. In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, physicists Travis Cradd... (read more)
After a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery in 2010, Steve Colburn of Portland, Ore., began taking a cholesterol-lowering statin at the maximum dose. Soon, he began experiencing memory problems. “Thinking and remembering became so laborious that I could not even recall my three-digit telephone extension or computer password at work,” said Mr. Colburn, 62, a sales representative and product developer.... (read more)
Thousands of patients with advanced Alzheimer's disease could benefit from drugs, research suggests. A study in the the New England Journal of Medicine found that patients who stayed on the dementia drug Aricept had a slower decline in their memory. The drug tends not to be prescribed once sufferers progress beyond moderate symptoms. Medicines regulator NICE said its guidelines supported continui... (read more)
A major downside of the medical use of marijuana is the drug's ill effects on working memory, the ability to transiently hold and process information for reasoning, comprehension and learning. Researchers reporting in the March 2 print issue of the Cell Press journal Cell provide new insight into the source of those memory lapses. The answer comes as quite a surprise: Marijuana's major psychoactive ingredient (THC) impairs memor... (read more)
Health regulators are adding warnings to the labels of widely used cholesterol lowering drugs, such as Lipitor, to say they may raise levels of blood sugar and could cause memory loss. The Food and Drug Administration announced on Tuesday the changes to the safety information on the labels of statins such as Pfizer Inc's Lipitor, AstraZeneca's Crestor and Merck & Co's Zocor that are taken by tens of m... (read more)
Researchers at the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics have discovered an answer to the long-standing mystery of how brain cells can both remember new memories while also maintaining older ones. They found that specific neurons in a brain region called the dentate gyrus serve distinct roles in memory formation depending on whether the neural stem cells that produced them were of old versus young a... (read more)
People who have trouble sleeping may be at higher risk of developing memory problems, new research shows. People who woke frequently in the night had a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, according to work to be presented at the American Academy of Neurology meeting in New Orleans in April. Other research has shown a link between impaired sleep and multiple-personality di... (read more)
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 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 th... (read more)
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 ing... (read more)
A team of researchers at the MedUni Vienna's Department of Neurophysiology (Centre for Brain Research) has discovered a previously unknown effect of opioids: the study, which has now been published in the journal Science and was led by Ruth Drdla-Schutting and Jürgen Sandkühler, shows that opioids not only temporarily relieve pain, but at the right dose can also erase memory traces of pain in the spinal cord and therefore... (read more)
Short-term memory plays a crucial role in how our consciousness operates. Several years ago a hypothesis has been formulated, according to which capacity of short-term memory depends in a special way on two cycles of brain electric activity. Scientists from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw have now demonstrated this experimentally for the first time. ... (read more)
Silent strokes, small areas of dead brain tissue, may be responsible for memory loss in older people. A study, released recently in the journal Neurology, looked at the effects of those silent strokes on memory, as well as hippocampus size. A smaller hippocampus has been linked in some prior studies with memory loss. Participants included 658 people age 65 and older who had no signs of dementia. Th... (read more)
Making some simple changes to your diet could help keep dementia at bay, a new study suggests. U.S. researchers found that elderly people with high levels of omega 3 found in oily fish and vitamins common in fruit and vegetables did better in memory tests than those with a less healthy diet. Brain scans confirmed those with the highest levels of vitamin D a... (read more)
Drugs that affect the levels of an important brain protein involved in learning and memory reverse cellular changes in the brain seen during aging, according to an animal study in the December 7 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings could one day aid in the development of new drugs that enhance cognitive function in older adults. Aging-related memory loss is associated ... (read more)
Have you ever walked into a room and realized you don’t remember what you’re doing there? Yeah, us too. Well thankfully science finally explains why: It’s the doorway’s fault, a new study finds. “When you go from room to room, your brain identifies each room as a new event and sets a new memory trace to capture the new event,” says study author Gabriel Radvansky, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of N... (read more)
Cannabis use is associated with disturbances in concentration and memory. New research by neuroscientists at the University of Bristol, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, has found that brain activity becomes uncoordinated and inaccurate during these altered states of mind, leading to neurophysiological and behavioural impairments reminiscent of those seen in schizophrenia. The collaborative study, ... (read more)
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, scientists have put memory within the paradigm of cognitive psychology. In recent decades, it has become one of the principal pillars of a branch of science called cognitive neuroscience, an interdisciplinary link between cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
Sensory memory corresponds approximately to the initial 200–500 milliseconds after an item is perceived. The ability to look at an item, and remember what it looked like with just a second of observation, or memorisation, is an example of sensory memory. With very short presentations, participants often report that they seem to "see" more than they can actually report. The first experiments exploring this form of sensory memory were conducted by George Sperling (1960) using the "partial report paradigm". Subjects were presented with a grid of 12 letters, arranged into three rows of four. After a brief presentation, subjects were then played either a high, medium or low tone, cuing them which of the rows to report. Based on these partial report experiments, Sperling was able to show that the capacity of sensory memory was approximately 12 items, but that it degraded very quickly (within a few hundred milliseconds). Because this form of memory degrades so quickly, participants would see the display, but be unable to report all of the items (12 in the "whole report" procedure) before they decayed. This type of memory cannot be prolonged via rehearsal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory
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