Stress and memory don’t mix very well.
Brain “ripples” experience into memories when you sleep, study shows
Sleep seems to be a keystone of memory formation and retention.
Meaning is better than repetition when you’re trying to memorize
Try it for finals.
People with good memory get bored faster
The reason is pretty simple.
New method developed to encode huge quantity of data in diamonds
Data is a girl’s best friend.
Experts are more likely to form false memories about events in their field
The more you know about a topic, the more likely you are are to remember things that never were there.
Scientists may have witnessed how memories form in real time — a first
A new study offers insight into how neurons work together to make us remember stuff.
Relying too much on the Internet for fact finding could hurt your brain
Just like anything else, it needs constant exercise to stay in shape.
Getting blackout drunk: how alcohol can leave you with no memory of the night before
Blacking out from alcohol is a bit more complicated than you might think.
Got an exam coming up? Better start sketching
A new study found that drawing information you need to remember is a very efficient way to enhance your memory. The researchers believe that the act of drawing helps create a more cohesive memory as it integrates visual, motor and semantic information. “We pitted drawing against a number of other known encoding strategies, but drawing always came out on top,”
IBM ups storage for next-gen memories hundreds of times faster than your SSD
A team from IBM Research dramatically increased the storage capacity of an alternative memory structure called phase-change memory (PCM) to 3 bits of data per cell. Many specialists think that PCM is the future, in a way similar to how flash is replacing hard drives.
People pick up and use discarded USB drives they find almost half the time
Portable data storage, such as USB drives, might not be quite as useful or sought after as they once were but they remain an undeniably handy method to carry your data around.
Study hints at a form of bacterial collective memory
A new study found that whole populations of bacteria retain their tolerance to stressors for a much longer duration than individual cells.
Eating sweets with every meal may help your memory
Scientists at the Georgia State University, Georgia Regents University and Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center found that the brain uses sweet foods to form the memory of a meal. The paper shows how the neurons in the dorsal hippocampus — a part of the brain that is critical for episodic memory — are activated by consuming sweets.
First ever optical chip to permanently store data developed
Material scientists at Oxford University, collaborating with experts from Karlsruhe, Munster and Exeter, have developed the world’s first light-based memory banks that can store data permanently. The device is build from simple materials, in use in CDs and DVDs today, and promises to dramatically improve the speed of modern computing.
How your brain puts the “where” and “when” in memories
Each memory relies on three critical elements, those being the “what,” “where” and “when” building blocks. Neuroscientists from MIT have identified a brain circuit — connecting the hippocampus and a region of the cortex known as entorhinal cortex — that handles the “when” and “where” components.
Your memories last as long the neural connections: a long-standing theory now confirmed
Neuroscientists have long posited that memories last as long as the connections in the brain, but putting this theory to test has always proved challenging. Using the latest imaging techniques and sheer innovation, a group at Stanford confirmed this as being true after the researchers literally peered into the brains of mice and studied brain connections as they formed or were replaced. Once the connection was lost, so was the memory.
Bees have false memories too – this might help explain how our own form
Memories aren’t infallible – even for those with photographic memory – so, more often than not, they’ll seem fuzzy. And the older these get, the fuzzier they’re recalled. Mixing names, faces and events in your head can sometimes be embarrassing, but at least we’re not alone. Seems like bees have false memories too, according to a study made by British researchers at Queen Mary University of London. Previously, false memories had been induced in other animals, like mice, but this is the first time natural false memories have been shown to happen. Research like this might help us, in time, understand how false memories are formed and, in a more general sense, how we recall events.
Long-term memory isn’t stored in synapses, meaning it could be restored even when struck by Alzheimer’s
For a while, the general consensus was that long term memories are stored in synapses. A new UCLA research topples this paradigm after experiments made on snails suggests that synapses aren’t that crucial storing memories as previously believed, but only facilitate the transfer of information someplace else, most likely in the nucleus of the neurons themselves – though this has yet
How the brain transforms bad experiences into long-lasting and unpleasant memories
Really bad experiences, like going through a particularly stressful or frighting situation, are a lot easier to remember than the things we do a day to day basis, or even those special pleasant experiences. That’s because we’re sort of evolutionary geared to remember those particularly nasty experiences so that we might avoid these in the future. A collaborative effort between New York