From old love letters to pieces of string, our homes are stuffed with stuff. When it comes time to empty a parent’s home, sorting the junk from the memory can be overwhelming
Jaw-dropping patient videos and miraculous testimonials ignited a frenzy in China over a technique that aims to improve drainage from the brain. Now it is entering trials worldwide.
Working with and living in spatially complex environments may help delay cognitive decline, though more research is needed.
Researchers conducting clinical trial for operation that drains abnormal build-up of two protein types in brain.
What a Picture of a Dog Has to Do with Reason and Logic: People who can’t see images in their minds challenge an old philosophical standby
What can Robin Williams and Bruce Willis teach us about dementia? This article explores the complex biological realities of brain diseases, controversies in Alzheimer's research, the risks of new drugs, and the multi-billion-dollar industry exploiting our fear of cognitive…
Frontotemporal Dementia
Lewy Body Dementia
How much attention do you pay to...well, attention? Attention is one of those many brain functions that you don't notice or think about when it is working fine, but can become debilitating if it is impaired in any way, and we notice when it is stressed to the point of failure…
New research shows distinct patterns in waves of brain activity carry information when forming and recalling memories.
Dig into what causes the tip of the tongue phenomenon, where your brain struggles to recall a word or term from memory.--You’re sure you know your 3rd grade ...
OpenAI's Sora allowed you to deepfake yourself. Users started to remember things that never happened.
Your brain on "not X but Y"
This happens in seconds. A student with high verbal aptitude processes this almost instantaneously.
Psychometricians have called antonyms the most efficient measure of verbal intelligence in the toolkit: high g-loading, high discrimination at the top of the ability range, no contextual scaffolding.
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…
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.
musical anhedonia
expectations
“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…
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…
A new study suggests our brains welcome gibberish words that sound gentle and kind with open arms while rejecting the harsh ones.
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.
Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire
blindsight
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.
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
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.
The compound has been linked to improved cognitive performance and reduced anxiety – but are you getting enough of it?
There is increasing evidence that imagination relies on similar neural mechanisms as externally triggered perception. This overlap presents a challeng…
Changing the narrative on false memories might be surprisingly simple.
During imagination, the information comes from the other direction: Higher-order areas of the visual cortex are activated first.
This is because reality monitoring can chuck “memories” into the false category through two primary ways. The first is the assessment of the richness of the memory. If a memory seems too just-the-facts, without those other enriching impressions, it seems more likely not to have truly happened to…
Violence is written in their genes.
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.
On our first memories
Artists may jumble time for dramatic effect. But your unconscious is always putting the narrative in order.
Different approaches can support varied forms of memory
In describing how they remember their lines, actors are telling us an important truth about memory.
New experiments reveal how the brain chooses which memories to save and add credence to advice about the importance of rest.
A famous case study helped spark a myth about a man who could not forget. But the truth is more complicated.
Nature - Nerve cells form long-term memories with the help of an inflammatory response, study in mice finds.
They’ve been studied by researchers and recruited by police forces, but what’s it actually like to be a super-recogniser?
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.
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. …
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…
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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.
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.
New research finds that the memories useful for future generalizations are held in the brain separately from those recording unusual events.
The long read: What do you say to someone whose wife prefers photographs of deceased authors to him?
Does this all feel a little familiar? Called déjà vu, that sensation may be your brain correcting its own errors
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.
Suppressing memories using an “amnesic shadow” could someday lead to a gentler therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder
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…
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…
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.
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.