How Memory Works

Latest news

  • New research shows memory consolidation requires simultaneous replay with hippocampal 'ripples'. These may depend on deeper processing.

A study involving epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted into their brain has revealed that memory

  • An imaging and eye-tracking study has shown that the brain uses eye movements to help us recall remembered images.

A small study has tested the eminent Donald Hebb’s hypothesis that visual imagery results from the reactivation of neural activity associated with viewing images, and that the re-enactment of eye-movement patterns helps both imagery and

  • A large survey sheds light on why we have slips of the tongue when we call very familiar people by the wrong name.

We've all done it: used the wrong name when we know the right one perfectly well. And we all know when it's most likely to happen. But here's a study come to reassure us that it's okay, this is just how we roll.

  • Individuals vary in how vividly they remember the past. A new study links this to differences in brain activity which may reflect a stable trait.
  • The finding also has implications for assessments of age-related cognitive decline.

A study involving 66 healthy young adults (average age 24) has revealed that different individuals have distinct brain connectivity patterns that are associated with different ways of experiencing and remembering the past.

  • New measurements have exploded the previous estimates of the human brain's memory capacity, and also help explain how neurons have such computational power when their energy use is so low.

The question of the brain's capacity usually brings up remarks that the human brain contains about 100 billion neurons. If each one has, say, 1,000 or more connections to other neurons, this produces some 100 trillion connections in which our memory can be held.

Because this is such a persistent myth, I thought I should briefly report on this massive study that should hopefully put an end to this myth once and for all (I wish! Myths are not so easily squashed.)

The two measures of working memory capacity appear to be fully independent, and only one of them is related to intelligence.

The number of items a person can hold in short-term memory is strongly correlated with their IQ. But short-term memory has been recently found to vary along another dimension as well: some people remember (‘see’) the items in short-term memory more clearly and precisely than other people.

A recent study reveals that when we focus on searching for something, regions across the brain are pulled into the search. The study sheds light on how attention works.

We talk about memory for ‘events’, but how does the brain decide what an event is? How does it decide what is part of an event and what isn’t?

Why do we find it so hard to stay on task for long? A recent study uses a new technique to show how the task control network and the default mode network interact (and fight each other for control).

Pages

Error | About memory

Error

The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.