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Ever caught yourself saying “I’m reading a great book” only to awkwardly correct yourself with “…well, actually I’m listening to it”? That guilty pause says a lot. But you have nothing to feel bad about. In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman, Dr. Bob Duke, and Rebecca McInroy break down […]

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Why Do We Like Music?
11 Feb 2026
newyorker.com

People with musical anhedonia don’t get any enjoyment from music. Shayla Love writes about scientists studying this condition to learn about how music affects listeners’ minds and moods.

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“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter in…

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At a time when memories are increasingly flattened into folders, feeds, and cloud backups, a new experimental device from MIT Media Lab proposes a far more intimate archive: scent. Developed by Cyrus Clarke, the Anemoia Device is a speculative yet functional prototype that translates photographs into bespoke fragrances using generative AI, inviting users not to

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A new study suggests our brains welcome gibberish words that sound gentle and kind with open arms while rejecting the harsh ones.

Why do so many people think the Fruit of the Loom logo had a cornucopia?
10 Nov 2025
www-technologyreview-com.cdn.ampproject.org
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Larissa MacFarquhar writes about the recent research into the neurodiverse syndromes known as aphantasia and hyperphantasia, their effects on our experience of trauma and memory, and the sense of identity that has grown up around them.

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Most of us forget what we ate for breakfast yesterday, but a teenager known only as TL can relive her life like rewinding a movie reel.

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Seeing and imagining use similar brain machinery. New research reveals the brain circuit that identifies what is real, which may help scientists understand conditions such as schizophrenia

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♫ Mahna Mahna, Do doo be-do-do ♫ (Why do we get earworms?)
30 May 2025
theneuroscienceofeverydaylife.substack.com

If we mention or even just allude to a catchy song, we risk having part of it playing on a loop in our head, for days on end. What's that about? And what can we do about it?

Spaced repetition systems are a well-known way to efficiently learn material. Recent innovations have applied machine learning to greatly improve their scheduling.

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The compound has been linked to improved cognitive performance and reduced anxiety – but are you getting enough of it?

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There is increasing evidence that imagination relies on similar neural mechanisms as externally triggered perception. This overlap presents a challeng…

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What Makes a Memory Real?
28 Mar 2025
nautil.us

Changing the narrative on false memories might be surprisingly simple.

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Violence is written in their genes.

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By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage proposal — that form scaffolds for memories of our experiences.

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Double Exposure - The American Scholar
28 Jan 2025
theamericanscholar.org

On our first memories

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Your Brain Wants a Linear Story
1 Aug 2024
nautil.us

Artists may jumble time for dramatic effect. But your unconscious is always putting the narrative in order.

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Different approaches can support varied forms of memory

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How Actors Remember Their Lines
27 May 2024
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

In describing how they remember their lines, actors are telling us an important truth about memory.

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New experiments reveal how the brain chooses which memories to save and add credence to advice about the importance of rest.

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A famous case study helped spark a myth about a man who could not forget. But the truth is more complicated.

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Nature - Nerve cells form long-term memories with the help of an inflammatory response, study in mice finds.

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They’ve been studied by researchers and recruited by police forces, but what’s it actually like to be a super-recogniser?

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CTV W5 puts the spotlight on 18-year-old Emily Nash, who appears to be the first Canadian, and among the youngest people in the world, to have a rare but extraordinary super memory.

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One of the most expansive memories ever documented belonged to a Russian newspaper reporter named Solomon Shereshevsky. For much of his life, he was oblivious of the peculiar nature of his memory. …

Doorway effect
11 Feb 2024
en.m.wikipedia.org

The 'doorway effect' or 'location updating effect' is a replicable psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another.[1] We tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary[2] and often forget what we were thinking about or planning on doing upon entering a different room.[3] Research suggests that this phenomenon occurs both at literal boundaries (e.g., moving from one room to another via a door) and metaphorical boundaries (e.g., imagining traversing a doorway, or even when moving from one desktop window to another on a computer).[2]

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Ten Examples of the Mandela Effect
1 Feb 2024
getpocket.com

Did Tom Cruise really dance in his underwear and a pair of Ray-Bans in “Risky Business”? If you answered “yes,” you might be suffering from the Mandela Effect.

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Recalling items from scratch is harder than recognizing the correct option in a list of choices because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.

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New research finds that the memories useful for future generalizations are held in the brain separately from those recording unusual events.

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The long read: What do you say to someone whose wife prefers photographs of deceased authors to him?

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What Causes Déjà Vu?
9 Feb 2023
scientificamerican.com

Does this all feel a little familiar? Called déjà vu, that sensation may be your brain correcting its own errors

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The neural representations of a perceived image and the memory of it are almost the same. New work shows how and why they are different.

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Suppressing memories using an “amnesic shadow” could someday lead to a gentler therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder

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The art of memory: mnemonic techniques
18 Jul 2022
nesslabs.com

Nowadays, when we want to remember something, we mostly use our phone to take a quick note, create a reminder, message ourselves on Slack, or just add it to our calendar. Granted, having a good memory may not be as useful as it used to be, but there’s lots of research showing that training your ... Read More

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The generation effect
18 Jul 2022
nesslabs.com

Do you feel like you can remember things better when you actively engage with the information and create your own version of it? That’s called the Generation Effect. In a research paper published in 1978 in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, scientists described it as the phenomenon where information is better remembered ... Read More

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Psychologists say it's no surprise that we have such a strong memory for music and can easily recall lyrics and melodies, even if we haven’t heard them in years.

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Familiarity has a major impact on our decision-making process. Understanding the psychology behind it will lead to better UX / design, copy and CTAs.

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The brain is basically a time machine that ensures what we see is stable and continuous.

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How to Memorize the Un-Memorizable
9 Nov 2021
lithub.com

Although I’ve successfully learned the language of mathematics, it has always frustrated me that I couldn’t master those more unpredictable languages like French or Russian that I’d tried to learn …

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Forget cramming, ditch the highlighter, and stop passively rereading. The psychology of learning offers better tactics

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Learning more efficiently is a matter of time--but not in the way you might think.

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The gesticulations that accompany your speech are so much more than mere hand-waving – they contain and convey meaning