Absent-Mindedness Is A Middle-Aged Male Problem, Research Shows

A study has shown that older men are more susceptible to absent-mindedness than women. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

From The Guardian:

Women come out best in listening and recollection tests in study by University of London's Institute of Education.

It's been an endless source of aggravation between the sexes; how can men so easily forget birthdays, anniversaries, and even friends' names?

Not, it seems, because they cannot be bothered to remember. Research suggests that, in middle age at least, absent-minded-ness is a particularly male problem.

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How Rest Helps Memory: Sleepy Heads

From The Economist:

Researchers say a nap prepares the brain to learn.

MAD dogs and Englishmen, so the song has it, go out in the midday sun. And the business practices of England’s lineal descendant, America, will have you in the office from nine in the morning to five in the evening, if not longer. Much of the world, though, prefers to take a siesta. And research presented to the AAAS meeting in San Diego suggests it may be right to do so. It has already been established that those who siesta are less likely to die of heart disease. Now, Matthew Walker and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that they probably have better memory, too. An afternoon nap, Dr Walker has discovered, sets the brain up for learning.

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Memory-Erasing Drugs Could Result From New Brain Discovery

From Live Science:

A newfound brain mechanism erases memories on purpose to help make way for new ones. Scientists suggest it could lead to the development of memory-erasing drugs that make a person forget certain things.

Researchers have often debated about the reasons we forget — for instance, why newly acquired short-term memories are fleeting. One theory suggests that such memories are simply unstable, fading over time. Others contend interference causes short-term memories to be overridden as new data comes in.

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Magnesium May Boost Brainpower

From Live Science:

Mice given extra doses of a new magnesium compound had better working memory, long-term memory and greater learning ability.

Before you go popping heavy doses of magnesium, however, know that much more testing is needed. Though rodent brains work similarly to ours, animal studies do not always predict what will happen in humans.

"If MgT is shown to be safe and effective in humans, these results may have a significant impact on public health," said Guosong Liu, director of the Center for Learning and Memory at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

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Learning To Forget

In the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Jim Carrey has his memory erased to forget a painful relationship. Scientists are a long way off performing this type of procedure in people, but studies suggest that it is, indeed, possible. Credit: Focus Features

From Cosmos:

Painful memories that cause distress could soon be a thing of the past. Recent studies suggest memories can be manipulated, edited - and even deleted.

JASON NICOLL IS TORMENTED by the past. In 1994, when he was 21 years old, he was deployed with the Australian Defence Force to serve six months in Rwanda. This was at the height of the genocide.

"I saw dead bodies, people who'd stood on land mines, people who'd been shot or hacked up with machetes. Once, I carried a young girl, about eight or nine years old, who'd been shot in the chest.

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Daily Pint Of Blueberry Juice 'Could Help Stop Memory Loss', Study Suggests

Those who drank blueberry juice showed a "significant improvement
on learning and memory tests", scientists said.

From The Telegraph:

A daily pint of blueberry juice could help reduce memory loss, according to scientists.

According to the study of pensioners with signs of dementia, the fruit was found to sharpen recall, even when memory had started to fail.

In the first such test on humans, the group of pensioners drank the juice over 12 weeks, which helped improve their memory and recall in a series of tests.

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Bad Memory? Forget It!

From The Daily Mail:

Do you have trouble remembering where you left your car keys? Do you struggle to recall people's names? A study from Cambridge University suggests that regular aerobic exercise - such as jogging - can significantly boost memory by triggering the growth of grey matter in the brain. But are there other things we can do to develop our brain cells? We asked eight-times World Memory Champion Dominic O'Brien, author of Learn To Remember and a host of bestselling memory books, for his tips...

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Calpain Is Important To Memory Processes After All

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 21, 2010) — A second high-profile paper in as many months has found an important role in learning and memory for calpain, a molecule whose academic fortunes have ebbed and flowed for 25 years.

USC's Michel Baudry (then at the University of California, Irvine) and Gary Lynch (UC Irvine) first pointed to calpain as the key to memory in a seminal 1984 paper in Science on the biochemistry of memory.

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The Dangers Of A High-Information Diet

Are we in danger of knowing too much? (Caozhizheng/Rex Features)

From New Scientist:

NO ONE ever tells you how dangerous this stuff can be: they just go on pumping it out, hour after hour, day after day. You're consuming it right now, without a clue about the possible consequences. The worst thing is, evolution has predisposed your brain to crave it as much as your body craves fat and sugar. And these days - as with fat and sugar - you can get it everywhere.

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Brain 'Entanglement' Could Explain Memories

Mirror image: neurons in the brain begin to clone after reaching a
'tipping point' of activity (Image: Stone/Getty)

From The New Scientist:

Subatomic particles do it. Now the observation that groups of brain cells seem to have their own version of quantum entanglement, or "spooky action at a distance", could help explain how our minds combine experiences from many different senses into one memory.

Previous experiments have shown that the electrical activity of neurons in separate parts of the brain can oscillate simultaneously at the same frequency – a process known as phase locking. The frequency seems to be a signature that marks out neurons working on the same task, allowing them to identify each other.

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How The Brain Encodes Memories At A Cellular Level

This is a neuron. (Credit: Sourav Banerjee)

From The Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 25, 2009) — Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory.

The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other.

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Scientists Decode Memory-Forming Brain Cell Conversations

Artist's rendering of neurons. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 16, 2009) — The conversations neurons have as they form and recall memories have been decoded by Medical College of Georgia scientists.

The breakthrough in recognizing in real time the formation and recollection of a memory opens the door to objective, thorough memory studies and eventually better therapies, said Dr. Joe Tsien, neuroscientist and co-director of MCG's Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute. He is corresponding author on the study published Dec. 16 in PLoS ONE.

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Five Ways To Revolutionise Computer Memory

Digital memory is getting smaller and smaller (Image: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty)

From New Scientist:

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the idea that you might store your entire music collection on a single hand-held device would have been greeted with disbelief. Ditto backing up all your essential computer files using a memory stick key ring, or storing thousands of high-resolution holiday snaps in one pocket-sized camera.

What a difference a decade makes. The impossible has become possible thanks to the lightning rise of a memory technology with the snazzy name of "flash".

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Dissection Begins On Famous Brain

From The New York Times:

SAN DIEGO — The man who could not remember has left scientists a gift that will provide insights for generations to come: his brain, now being dissected and digitally mapped in exquisite detail.

The man, Henry Molaison — known during his lifetime only as H.M., to protect his privacy — lost the ability to form new memories after a brain operation in 1953, and over the next half century he became the most studied patient in brain science.

He consented years ago to donate his brain for study, and last February Dr. Jacopo Annese, an assistant professor of radiology at the University of California, San Diego, traveled across the country and flew back with the brain seated next to him on Jet Blue.

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Uncovering Secrets of Human Memory

Watch CBS News Videos Online

From CBS News:

Scientists Examine Famous Brain to Try and Understand Why We Remember Some Things and Forget Others.

(CBS) Today, at the University of California, San Diego Brain Observatory, scientists are shaving hair-fine slices from a frozen and very special brain, seeking to uncover the source of human memory, reports CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker.

"The goal of the lab is to paint a picture of what the brain is like and how that picture is different and makes us who we are," said Jacopo Annese, the director of the Observatory.

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Sounds During Sleep Aid Memory, Study Finds

From The New York Times:

Science has never given much credence to claims that you can learn French or Chinese by having the instruction CDs play while you sleep. If any learning happens that way, most scientists say, the language lesson is probably waking the sleeper up, not causing nouns and verbs to seep into a sound-asleep mind.

But a new study about a different kind of audio approach during sleep gives insight into how the sleeping brain works, and might eventually come in handy to people studying a language, cramming for a test or memorizing lines in a play.

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Surprising Discovery Explains Formation Of New Memories

From U.S. News And World Report:

Short-term memory may depend in a surprising way on the ability of newly formed neurons to erase older connections. That's the conclusion of a report in the November 13th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, that provides some of the first evidence in mice and rats that new neurons sprouted in the hippocampus cause the decay of short-term fear memories in that brain region, without an overall memory loss.

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Rat Made Supersmart -- Similar Boost Unsafe in Humans?

Scientists have tripled the memory of a rat named Hobbie-J (not pictured) by enhancing a single gene, suggesting that similar therapies may someday aid—or bedevil—humans, according to an October 2009 study. Photograph by Vincent J. Musi, National Geographic Stock

From National Geographic:

By modifying a single gene, scientists have made Hobbie-J the smartest rat in the world, a new study says.

A similar gene tweak might boost human brainpower too, but scientists warn that there is such a thing as being too smart for your own good.

For years scientifically smartened rats have skittered through movies and books such as Flowers for Algernon and The Secret of NIMH. But Hobbie-J is anything but fiction.

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Receptor Controls Long Term Memory Formation

From Future Pundit:

A drug that turns off the nogo receptor 1 blocks long term memory formation in mice. Imagine a drug that did the same thing in humans. It would have all sorts of uses and abuses.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered a mechanism that controls the brain's ability to create lasting memories. In experiments on genetically manipulated mice, they were able to switch on and off the animals' ability to form lasting memories by adding a substance to their drinking water. The findings, which are published in the scientific journal PNAS, are of potential significance to the future treatment of Alzheimer's and stroke.

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Scientists Decipher The Formation Of Lasting Memories

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 11, 2009) — Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered a mechanism that controls the brain's ability to create lasting memories. In experiments on genetically manipulated mice, they were able to switch on and off the animals' ability to form lasting memories by adding a substance to their drinking water. The findings, which are published in the scientific journal PNAS, are of potential significance to the future treatment of Alzheimer's and stroke.

Read more ....