Articles

Here’s an interesting study that’s just been reported: 72 seven- and eight-month-old infants watched video animations of familiar fun items being revealed from behind a set of colorful boxes (see the 3-minute YouTube video).

People are poor at assessing their own memory

One thing research seems to show rather consistently is that, for older adults in particular, beliefs about one's own memory performance have little to do with one's actual memory performance¹. People who believe they have a poor memory are usually no worse at remembering than those who believe they have a good memory.

The evidence that diet, physical exercise, and mental stimulation all help prevent age-related cognitive decline and reduce the risk of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s, is now very convincing.

Studies of mice and (rather intriguingly) beagles, have provided evidence that ‘enriched’ environments — ones that provide opportunities for regular exercise and mental stimulation — reduce or prevent age-related cognitive decline, and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s.

• Is there such a thing as a photographic memory?
• Will memorizing lists and speeches improve my memory?
• I've read that people only use 10% of their brain. Is this true?
• I seem to have more trouble remembering words and names I know perfectly well.

What is neurogenesis?

Neurogenesis — the creation of new brain cells — occurs of course at a great rate in the very young. For a long time, it was not thought to occur in adult brains — once you were grown, it was thought, all you could do was watch your brain cells die!

Adult neurogenesis (the creation of new brain cells in adult brains) was first discovered in 1965, but only recently has it been accepted as a general phenomenon that occurs in many species, including humans (1998).

Prevalence

Vascular dementia, as its name suggests, is caused by poor blood flow, produced by a single, localized stroke, or series of strokes.

It is the second most common dementia, accounting for perhaps 17% of dementias. It also co-occurs with Alzheimer's in 25-45% of cases. Although there are other types of dementia that also co-occur with Alzheimer's, mixed dementia generally refers to the co-occurrence of Alzheimer's and vascular dementia.

"Consolidation" is a term that is bandied about a lot in recent memory research. Here's my take on what it means.

Becoming a memory

Initially, information is thought to be encoded as patterns of neural activity — cells "talking" to each other. Later, the information is coded in more persistent molecular or structural formats (e.g., the formation of new synapses). It has been assumed that once this occurs, the memory is "fixed" — a permanent, unchanging, representation.

Common everyday memory strategies

The most frequently used everyday memory strategies are:

Remembering a skill is entirely different from remembering other kinds of knowledge. It’s the difference between knowing how and knowing that.

There are many memory strategies that can be effective in improving your recall of text. However, recent research shows that it is simplistic to think that you can improve your remembering by applying any of these strategies to any text. Different strategies are effective with different types of text.