Just to let you know I've collated a number of the articles that appear on my website and put them up as pdf documents, for those who want to print them them and read them at leisure, or have trouble with slow internet connections (I'd remind you that pdf documents are of course particularly slow if you have a slow connection, but at least you can go do something else while it's downloading!). The documents are listed here.

So much memory research seems to involve imaging technology nowadays! If you want to know how magnetic resonance imaging works, check out this article.

I was entranced by a recent study, into the capabilities of the black-capped chickadee. Every autumn, this songbird roams a territory covering tens of square miles, gathering seeds and storing them in hundreds of hiding places. But it's not its remarkable spatial memory that's so marvellous - it's the fact that its hippocampus (a part of the brain that's crucial for so many functions, including spatial memory) expands by nearly a third during this period. It does this by growing new neurons. In the spring, it shrinks again (it's clearly not worth having that bigger brain all year round! - is there a lesson in that for us?)

Nothing to do with memory, but a reminder about the nature of our sensory apparatus, and our brain. What we perceive seems so direct it's hard to believe that it's really a construction of our brain, but so it is. Perception, like memory, is all about information coded in the brain. It's all about patterns of neurons firing, after all. And the difference between, say, sight and sound, is not as far as it seems. Here's a site with software to turn sound into "vision", for those who can't see, and here's an article about it. And if you don't really believe that we construct the world we see, check out this demonstration of the blind spot.