Designed to help individuals suffering from memory loss, a new prosthesis which includes a small array of electrodes implanted into the brain has performed well in laboratory testing in animals and is now being evaluated in human patients. A report on the device was presented at the 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering […]
The molecular pathways responsible for the learning and memory problems associated with marijuana use have been mapped by scientists for the first time. Importantly, the new research, published in the journal Cell, suggests that the over-the-counter painkiller ibuprofen (Advil) can prevent, or reduce, these debilitating side-effects. The researchers behind the new work say their discovery […]
Researchers have found a new way to switch magnetism that is at least 1,000 times faster than methods currently used in magnetic memory technologies. The discovery, reported in Nature, potentially opens the door to terahertz (1012hertz) and faster memory speeds. The research team comprised scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, Iowa State […]
Experiencing a color when viewing particular letters or numbers – known as color-graphemesynesthesia – may partly be a learned behavior, say Stanford researchers who uncovered startlingly similar color-letter pairings shared by a number of color grapheme synesthetes who played with the same childhood toy. Researchers Nathan Witthoft and Jonathan Winawer based their findings, appearing inPsychological […]
Everyone has experienced the frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were planning to do in there. The reason, says University of Notre Dame psychology professor Gabriel Radvansky, is that entering or exiting household doorways serves to create “event boundaries” in the mind. Radvansky conducted three experiments – in both real and virtual […]
Depo Provera, the hormonal birth control injection, supposedly offers a convenient alternative for women who don’t want to remember to take the Pill daily. Ironically, however, new research from Arizona State University indicates that the drug may profoundly impair a person’s memory. Arizona State researchers Blair Braden and Heather Bimonte-Nelson have published their findings in […]
Women who use hormonal contraceptives such as the Pill experience memory changes where their ability to remember the detail surrounding an emotional event is reduced. The new finding adds to a growing list of cognitive functions that are believed to be affected by hormonal contraception. “What’s most exciting about this study is that it shows […]
The notion that we can intentionally forget unwanted memories has been controversial ever since Freud proposed it at the beginning of the 20th century. Now, neuroimaging experiments show that Freud was correct and we can control what we forget. Swedish researcher Gerd Thomas Waldhauser, from Lund University, carried out the experiments with volunteers who were […]
According to researcher Hitoshi Morikawa, repeated ethanol exposure enhances synaptic plasticity in the brain, providing further evidence toward an emerging scientific consensus that drug and alcohol addiction is fundamentally a learning and memory disorder. “Drinking alcohol primes certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better,” contends Morikawa, from The University of Texas at […]
Scientists have directly manipulated the activity of individual neurons to give flies memories of a bad experience they never really had, according to a report in the journal Cell. “Flies have the ability to learn, but the circuits that instruct memory formation were unknown,” said researcher Gero Miesenböck, of the University of Oxford. “We were […]
