People are fascinated by the topic of déjà vu, or the feeling that one is reliving some prior experience. The déjà vu phenomenon has been investigated by psychologists throughout the history of the discipline, and a number of theories — neurological, supernatural, pathological, and otherwise — have been proposed to explain its presumed occurrence.
A team of Dutch researchers, led by Herman Sno, have investigated the topic at length in recent years. Sno and his colleagues argue that the déjà vu experience can be examined using the hologram as a model. In holographic photography, each piece of an image contains the full information necessary to reproduce the image, a property that gives holographic images their three-dimensional qualities. T ...
A team of researchers at Birjand University of Medical Sciences in Iran recently reviewed several past studies exploring the effects of cinnamon on cognitive functions. Their analysis, outlined in Nutritional Neuroscience, highlights the potential value of cinnamon for preventing or reducing memory or learning impairments.
Nakhaee, Kooshki and their colleagues reviewed hundreds of studies stored in several online research databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar and Web of Science. They then narrowed down their analysis to 40 of these studies, those that were most pertinent to their topic of interest.
Among these 40 studies, 33 were carried out in vivo (i.e., examining real living organisms, such as humans, rodents, or other animal ...
There's more to studying than simply memorization and practice. It turns out that your diet also plays a pivotal role in recalling key bits of information, while keeping you energized and focused in the process. We're not talking about those scam-ridden supplements that promise a boost in brain power, but simple natural foods such as milk, nuts, seeds, rice, and oats.
The nutrients found in these items help your study efforts by releasing natural memory enhancers called CCKs ( cholecystokinin). When CCK crosses the blood-brain barrier, it acts as a neurotransmitter associated with memory. Studies have shown that learning and memory processes are severely damaged (in rats) that genetically do not respond to the presence of CCK. And in people ...
In a recent study, scientists delivered a molecule called FKBP1b into the central memory station found in the brain of aging rats. Upon administrating the molecule, hundreds of formally active genes were reactivated, in a pattern that closely resembles those of younger, more mentally agile rats than aged ones. As a result, the rats showed enhanced learning and appeared to reverse memory shortfalls when tackling a maze. These findings suggest that the mental rustiness which accompanies aging happens because the amount of this one molecule goes down; a follow up study is currently in the works to see why that is.
In fact, thinking and summer don't really mix. Yet we don't want to return to school feeling like a lower-IQ version of Keanu Reeves. How to strike a balance?
I'm sure you've all had that feeling before: You bust out the first assignment of the new school year, you sit down and grab a pencil, you put that pencil to the paper and you... stare. Gaze. Daydream. Sniffle?
"Dude, how is this stuff even remotely difficult?" you say. "It was a piece of cake four months ago."
Yeah, then that whole summer thing got in the way. Funny how cruel overexposure to sunlight, fireworks, burnt hot dogs and fried Twinkies can be.
Four months off is enough time to forget a semester. Six months will erase a year. And as I found out l ...
For decades, scientists have debated whether rapid eye movement sleep - the phase where dreams appear - is directly involved in memory formation. Now, a study provides evidence that REM sleep does, indeed, play this role in mice.
In this new study, the researchers used optogenetics, a recently developed technology that enables scientists to target precisely a population of neurons and control its activity by light. For this study, the neurons in the hippocampus were targeted (hippocampus being the structure that is critical for memory formation during wakefulness and is known as the 'GPS system' of the brain).
To test the long-term spatial memory of mice, the scientists trained the rodents to spot a new object placed in a controlled environm ...
Someone who greatly enjoys sweet foods is said to have a "sweet tooth." Experimental evidence now shows us that eating sweets forms memories that may control eating habits. In other words, people may enjoy eating sweets because the taste is correlated with positive memories.
The findings, published online in the journal Hippocampus, show that neurons in the dorsal hippocampus, the part of the brain that is critical for episodic memory, are activated by consuming sweets. Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events experienced at a particular time and place.
In the study, a meal consisting of a sweetened solution, either sucrose or saccharin, significantly increased the expression of the synaptic plasticity marker called activity ...
There are two different "thinking" systems that predominate our brain. They are responsible for our first impressions and then later changing them, our in depth views and perspectives, in addition modulating our thinking with respect to a given context. System one is mainly the "fast" thinking system. System two is a relatively slower thinking system. Their remarkably different yet crucial functions are portrayed beautifully in this video.
While it's hard to calculate the memory capacity of the human brain, some estimates have put the number closer to 2.5 petabytes. But this is a great rough comparison.
It turns out that our evolutionary cousins can recall number placement better than people can. In the experiment, the task requires the chimp to touch the numbers in ascending order and he has only seconds to make his decisions. The numerals appeared only for a certain limited duration, and were then automatically replaced by white squares. After touching the number one, the rest of the numbers are obscured by squares, making the chimp reliant on his memory to correctly pick the numbers in the right order. After a whistle sounds, the numbers reappear in different positions, so the chimp has to remember the position of all nine numbers after seeing them only briefly. And the chimp quickly aces the test time and time again, r ...
