Researchers have discovered new brain waves critical for our memory. Continue reading How Sleep Deprivation Affects Your Memory: New Brain Waves Discovered to Play an Important Role
by Ariel Hairstonfigures by MacKenzie Mauger Our lives are stuffed with opportunities for excitement and stimulation. You might wake up in the morning and find yourself staring at your modest collection of succulents, or that small oil painting you bought at a flea market. The first moments of your day might be spent taking a walk around the block, the smell of tree bark hanging … Continue reading Home Decor and the Hippocampus: How environmental enrichment can enhance brain function
Dopamine is not just a happy hormone — it is also heavily involved in learning and memory. Recent studies are showing that dopamine plays a key role in auditory learning in songbirds. Continue reading Happy Hormones Play a Role in Vocal and Sound Learning
Why is it that some people seem to have better memories than others? A team of scientist from Stanford reported that frequent attention lapses may be a cause, and people who are heavy media multitaskers are more likely to suffer from this. Continue reading Stop Multitasking on Your Phone: Media Multitasking May Lead to Attention Lapses and Poor Memory
Venus flytraps use calcium signaling to remember and trap prey. Continue reading Remembering Prey: The Short-Term Memories of Venus Flytraps
Researchers from the University of Sussex recently found that wood ants seem to store long-term and short-term memories in different brain hemispheres. They found this by studying ants as they were conditioned to associate a visual input with food.
Continue reading Ants Store Long-term and Short-term Memories on Separate Sides of the Brain
Scientists at ETH Zurich recently developed a storage architecture using DNA, where they fused DNA into everyday objects in order to store data. Continue reading Artificial DNA can replace your thumb drive
Electrical recordings from human subjects have revealed the existence of memory-trace cells, which change their response depending on which previous experience is supposed to be recalled, providing a major insight into how the brain remembers specific events. Continue reading Learning to Remember: Memory-Trace Cells
As you read this article, you may not be consciously trying to memorize each sentence, but the words do need to stick around temporarily. After all, you have to remember what you just read to understand the full article. This is your working memory, sometimes called “short-term memory,” and it allows us to remember things just long enough to complete a task. Its decline is … Continue reading Need to jog your memory? A zap to the brain could help
They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks – but maybe you can have an old brain grow new neurons. New research published in Nature Medicine has shed some light onto the debated topic of whether adult brains can create new neurons in the hippocampus, the region of the brain that is important in short- and long-term memory consolidation. As you might expect, … Continue reading Old Brain, New Neurons?