memory
zooillogix | June 3, 2010Turns out casual experimention with a little meth here and there is a good thing, if you're a snail. A paper recently published in the Journal of Experimental Biology explains how snails were able to remember negative stimuli longer when under the influence of a bit of speed.
When great pond snails (Lymnaea stagnalis) venture into low oxygen water, they extend a breathing tube above the water's surface. Researchers seperated a bunch of these party snails into two groups and put one sober group in normal water and another in meth-laced water. Then when the snails went to extend their…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010
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A press release about Snails on methamphetamines works for me.  The story is about memory. The jokes are about snails:
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Snail Joke #1
A turtle gets mugged by a gang of snails. Cop is interviewing the turtle afterwards, still at the scene. Turtle still flustered. Cop asks, "Just start at the beginning."
"I don't know," says the turtle. "It all happened so fast."
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Snail Joke #2
Guy opens his front door and grabs the paper off the porch. There's a snail on it. He gives a flick of the wrist, and the snail sails off the porch into the garden.
Three weeks later there's a knock at the…
neurophilosophy | May 27, 2010DAYDREAMING is a critical component of conscious experience. The mind can perform mental time travel - it occasionally strays from the present moment, to recollect an experience from the near or distant past, or to imagine an event that has not yet taken place. We know that thinking about the future is dependant on memory, because patients with amnesia cannot imagine new experiences. It involves piecing together fragments of past experiences to generate a plausible simulation of what might happen. This may have been an important development in human evolution, as it enables us anticipate a…
sb admin | May 17, 2010So a week back or so, a number of friends read an article about death by rectal eel and immediately thought of me. For those of you who missed the story, it went a little something like this:
* Chinese man gets drunk with friends and passes out
* Friends think it would be hilarious to insert a large living swamp eel into the man's butt while he is unconscious
* Hilarity does not ensue. In fact, the man dies. Chinese doctor says the eel "consumed the man's bowels"
The article was widely reported in major news outlets like CNN and the Times, but I am linking instead to the UK edition of…
neurophilosophy | March 13, 2010FORMATION of a memory is widely believed to leave a 'trace' in the brain - a fleeting pattern of electrical activity which strengthens the connections within a widely distributed network of neurons, and which re-emerges when the memory is recalled. The concept of the memory trace was first proposed nearly a century ago, but the nature of the trace, its precise location in the brain and the underlying neural mechanisms all remain elusive. Researchers from University College London now report that functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) can be used to decode individual memory traces and to predict…
grrlscientist | March 3, 2010tags: neuroscience, happiness, experience, memory, colonoscopy, vacation, well-being, income, Daniel Kahneman, TEDTalks, streaming video
Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers…
ddobbs | February 14, 2010
I profiled neuroscientist Eric Kandel for Scientific American Mind a while back; a huge pleasure. Two things stand out.
First, Kandel's work makes a wonderful foundation for an understanding of neuroscience, as his mid-20th-century insights into the dynamics of memory underlie much of the discipline.
Second, Kandel is a gas -- gracious, funny, and stunningly brilliant. When I interviewed him for about 90 minutes in his office at Columbia, he was 73. As he described to me the history of his work, and of modern neuroscience, he seemed to have complete and effortless recall about…
cagapakis | January 7, 2010
My friend Devin's essay, "Making Cellular Memories" just came out today in Cell (and it's open access!) It's a great look at how natural cells and synthetic biological systems use feedback loops in order to maintain memory of past events. Like whole animals, cells need to remember what happened to them before in order to respond appropriately to new signals. Synthetic biologists can use memory to track cells that have experienced a certain input in a heterogeneous population, and to activate different responses depending on the historical context.
In sum, both nature's wisdom and previously…
edyong | January 6, 2010The latest issue of Eureka, the Times's monthly science supplement, is out today. I've been incredibly supportive of the venture and it's great to see that a major national newspaper is increasing its science coverage, rather than cutting back on it. For this issue (the fourth, I think), I've written a piece on fear and memory, including a lot of research that I've previously covered in this blog.
While writing the piece, I interviewed a scientist called Todd Sacktor who's doing some fascinating work in this field. Sacktor discovered that a protein called PKMzeta is vital for storing memory…
neurophilosophy | December 15, 2009MEMORY is one of the biggest enduring mysteries of modern neuroscience, and has perhaps been researched more intensively than any other aspect of brain function. The past few decades have yielded a great deal of knowledge about the cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory, and it is now widely believed that memories are formed as a result of biochemical changes which ultimately lead to the strengthening of connections between nerve cells.
It is, however, also clear that memories are not encoded at the level of single neurons. Instead, the memory trace is thought of as a flurry of…
neurophilosophy | December 13, 2009
IN February of this year, Jacopo Annese (above), a neuroanatomist and radiologist at the University of California, San Diego travelled to Boston to take delivery of a brain. For Annese, collecting brains is not unusual - he is, after all, director of UCSD's Brain Observatory, which will eventually become a comprehensive library of brains donated by people who had neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's Disease, as well as by healthy people of all ages. This time though, the brain he collected was very special: it belonged to the amnesic patient Henry Molaison, who for more than 50 years…
edyong | December 9, 2009Bringing an old memory back to mind would, you might think, strengthen it. But not so - when memories are recalled, they enter a surprisingly vulnerable state, when they can be reshaped or even rewritten. It takes a while for the memory to become strengthened anew, through a process called reconsolidation. Memories aren't just written once, but every time we remember them.
This system allows us to rapidly update our memories with new information, for a more flexible and adaptable brain. It also means that the very act of remembering provides a valuable window of opportunity, during which…
edyong | November 20, 2009In my final year of university, with exam deadlines looming and time increasingly fleeting, I considered recording some of my notes and playing them over while I was asleep. The concept of effectively gaining 6 extra hours of revision was appealing, but the idea didn't stick - it took too long to record the information and the noise stopped me from sleeping in the first place. And the whole thing had a vague hint of daftness about it. But a new experiment suggests that the idea actually has some merit, showing that you can indeed strengthen individual memories by reactivating them as you…
edyong | November 4, 2009When we think of memory aids, we consider repeating what we've learned, using clever mnemonics, or breaking information down into bite-size chunks. But one of the best memory aids we have available to us is something we all do on a daily basis - sleep. Studies have found that sleep enhances our memories of facts and physical skills alike. It can even help us remember movements that we see others do.
But this only works within a short window. Ysbrand van der Werf from the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience found that people who saw a video of someone tapping keys on a laptop remembered…
dmunger | October 28, 2009Product placements in movies and TV shows are becoming so commonplace that my kids now cynically take note of them whenever they appear. It wasn't always that way. In 1982 when I first saw E.T. I had no idea that Elliott's use of Reeses' Pieces to lure E.T. into his home was part of a clever marketing ploy that had been pre-arranged with the multinational conglomerate selling the candy. Now that nearly every household has a DVR allowing viewers to fast-forward through commercials, advertisers are relying more and more heavily on product placement to show off their wares. But how effective are…
neurophilosophy | October 20, 2009THE humble fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) has the ability to learn and remember, and to make predictions about the outcome of its behaviours on the basis of past experience. Compared to a human brain, that of the fruit fly is relatively simple, containing approximately 250,000 cells. Even so, little is known about the anatomical basis of memory formation. The neural circuitry underlying memories in these insects has now been dissected. In an elegant new study published in the journal Cell, researchers from the University of Oxford show that aversive memories are dependent on a tiny…
neurophilosophy | September 14, 2009
THIS short film clip shows two images of the same scene. Watch it carefully, and see if you can spot the subtle differences between them. As you watch, your eyes will dart back and forth across the images, so that you can perceive the most important features. And even though you might not be consciously aware of the differences, your brain will have picked up on them. This implicit form of remembering is referred to as relational memory; in this case, the brain is encoding the perceptual associations between items in the image. And recent studies have shown that relational…
dmunger | September 8, 2009Imagine a critical witness being grilled in preparation for a high-profile murder case. The prosecuting attorney wants to make sure she has every angle covered, so she questions the witness over and over to double- and triple-check that he has his story right. When he finally takes the stand, he remembers every detail she asked him about. But when the defense attorney cross-examines him, she takes an unexpected new tactic, asking about details the prosecutor hadn't prepared him for. He stumbles over some of the answers, contradicting other witnesses, and now all his testimony seems suspect.…
edyong | September 3, 2009As sufferers of post-traumatic stress syndrome know all too well, frightening experiences can be strong, long-lasting and notoriously difficult to erase. Now, we're starting to understand why. Far from trying to purge these memories, the brain actively protects them by hiring a group of molecular bodyguards called CSPGs (or chondroitin sulphate proteoglycans in full).
By studying the brains of rats, Nadine Gogolla from Harvard University found that CSPGs - large chains of sugars and proteins - accumulate in the space around nerve cells and form defensive nets around a select few. Dissolve…