Brain activity suggested that older people were making more effort to try and reconstruct their memories.
Do you call family members by the name of your dog? It’s actually pretty common.
Do you call family members by the name of your dog? It’s actually pretty common.
Getting family member’s names mixed up is not necessarily a sign of ageing.
In fact having your parents call you by a sibling’s name — or even the family pet — is perfectly normal.
‘Misnaming’ is a very common memory slip which follows certain predictable patterns.
Usually misnaming occurs between people in the same category, such as siblings, the researchers found.
The same is also true among a group of friends, whose names will tend to get mixed up.
Professor David Rubin, one of the study authors, said:
“It’s a cognitive mistake we make, which reveals something about who we consider to be in our group.
It’s not just random.”
Researchers surveyed over 1,700 people to reach their conclusions.
Even the family dog wasn’t immune to getting its name mixed up with other family members.
Ms Samantha Deffler, the study’s first author, explained:
“I’ll preface this by saying I have cats and I love them.
But our study does seem to add to evidence about the special relationship between people and dogs.
Also, dogs will respond to their names much more than cats, so those names are used more often.
Perhaps because of that, the dog’s name seems to become more integrated with people’s conceptions of their families.”
Names which sound more similar were also more likely to be mixed up.
Parents were particularly expert at mixing up the names of their children, even when their names, ages, appearances and even genders were different.
→ If you find names in general hard to remember, this should cheer you up.
The study was published in the journal Memory & Cognition (Deffler et al., 2016).
Which of these uncomplicated activities to you do most days?
Which of these uncomplicated activities to you do most days?
Do these most days and it will help protect your mental health.
Positive memories could be used as a way to help boost mental well-being, research finds.
People in the study were asked to focus on positive social memories.
Participants focused on their own positive feelings from that memory as well as on the positive feelings of the other person.
The results showed that people felt socially safer and more positive and relaxed after the exercise.
At the same time feelings of guilt and fear were reduced.
Tea is both calming and can make you feel more alert.
It improves cognitive performance in the short-term and may help fight Alzheimer’s in the long-term.
Finally, it is linked to better mental health.
I’ll raise a cup to that!
Read on: The mental benefits of tea.
Dealing with the minor stresses and strains of everyday life in a positive way is key to long-term health, a study finds.
The research found that people who remained calm or cheerful in the face of irritations had a lower risk of inflammation.
Viewing violent news events on social media can cause symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
A recent study has found that almost one-quarter of individuals had PTSD-like symptoms from following events like 9/11 and suicide bombings on social media.
The more people viewed the events, researchers found, the greater the subsequent trauma they experienced.
Despite consuming more calories than ever, many people do not get their recommended intake of brain-essential nutrients, a study reports.
The study explains the best way of getting the required nutrients:
“A traditional whole-food diet, consisting of higher intakes of foods such as vegetables, fruits, seafood, whole grains, lean meat, nuts, and legumes, with avoidance of processed foods, is more likely to provide the nutrients that afford resiliency against the pathogenesis of mental disorders.”
People who live with a water view have better mental health, research finds.
Don’t live near water? Any sort of green space or even a grassy rooftop will do just as well.
Compared with inactivity, even ‘mild’ levels of physical activity are linked to 50 percent better mental health, a study finds.
The more exercise people performed, the more protected they were against mental disorders, the research also found.
But both low and high levels of exercise were also linked to more than 50 percent reductions in the risk of suffering mental illness compared with being inactive.
Brushing your teeth regularly could reduce the risk of dementia by more than one-quarter, research finds.
People with fewer than 20 teeth are 26 percent more likely to develop cognitive problems that could lead to Alzheimer’s.
It is thought that chewing increases the blood-flow to the brain, thereby improving memory.
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Mind pops are random words or images that suddenly pop into your head for no reason — like a flashback.
Mind pops are random words or images that suddenly pop into your head for no reason — like a flashback.
You’re walking down the street, just like any other day, when suddenly a memory pops into your head from years ago.
It’s about a person you haven’t thought of for years.
Just for a moment you’re transported back to a time and place you thought was long-forgotten.
In a flash, though, the memory has vanished as quickly as it appeared.
This experience has been dubbed a ‘mind pop’ and sometimes it is prompted by nothing your conscious mind is aware of.
There is, perhaps, an even weirder type of mind pop.
This is when all you get is a word or an image which seems to have no connection to anything at all.
Like suddenly thinking of the word ‘orange’ or getting the image of a cheese grater.
They seem weirder because they feel unconnected to any past experience, place or person—a thought without any autobiographical context.
Not everyone has these experiences, but many do.
When psychologists have recorded these involuntary memories, they find that, on average, people have about one a day.
They are most likely to occur during routine, habitual activities, like walking down the street, brushing your teeth or getting dressed (Kvavilashvili & Mandler, 2004).
They are also more likely to come when your attention is roaming and diffused.
Some of these mind pops can even be traced back to their causes.
Here is one psychologist (L.K.) describing some mental detective work:
“…while throwing a used bag in a dust bin the word “Acapulco” popped up and since L.K. had no idea what it was and where she might have come across the word she turned to a member of family for help. To her surprise, it was pointed out to her that Acapulco was mentioned on the TV news some 45 minutes ago.”
This ability to trace a mind pop back to its source wasn’t an isolated case.
When they surveyed people, Kvavilashvili and Mandler found that the words and images that seemed to pop up randomly, didn’t actually come from nowhere.
Sometimes it was an associative mind pop, like being reminded about Christmas and later having the words ‘Jingle Bells’ pop into your head.
Or, it could be a sound-a-like, for example having the image of a sandy beach appear after you see a banana (Bahamas sounds like bananas).
The fact that many mind pops could not be traced back to their source is probably the result of how much of our processing is carried out unconsciously.
The fascinating thing was that many of these mind pops occurred weeks or months after exposure to the original trigger.
This suggests that these words, images and ideas can lie in wait for a considerable period.
Some even think that experiencing mind pops could be associated with creativity as these apparently random associations can help to solve creative problems.
Mind pops are another hint that we are recording more information than we know.
Fortunately, our minds mostly do a good job of suppressing random thoughts and images, as they can be extremely distracting.
So next time you have a mind pop, remember that, however weird, it has probably been triggered by something you’ve seen, heard or thought about recently, even if you can’t remember what.
Of course, why we get these particular ones and not others is still a mystery.
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50 percent boost in working memory from these activities from childhood.
The type of music that brings back the most vivid positive memories.
The type of music that brings back the most vivid positive memories.
One of the simplest ways to feel happier right now is to recall a happy memory.
Re-experiencing a happy moment from the past can give you just the required boost.
And music can help you do that — so long as you choose the right type.
Research suggests both happy and peaceful music helps you recall positive memories.
But, if you listen to music that is sad or emotionally scary, it will help bring back the wrong sort of memories.
It seems that upbeat, happy music, in particular, gives the quickest access to happy memories.
The study’s authors write:
“…positive and highly arousing musical cues resulted in the quickest access to memories, and we observed a link between the emotional valence, but not the arousal, levels of the cue and the accessed memories.”
It might not be a surprise that happy music helps bring back good memories.
But there was one surprise: the type of happy music was important.
Peaceful music brought back the most vivid, positive memories.
Peaceful music is typically positive but not too exciting.
As Dr Signy Sheldon, the study’s first author, explained:
“High cue arousal led to lower memory vividness and uniqueness ratings, but both high arousal and positive cues were associated with memories rated as more social and energetic.”
Randomly played music — both positive and negative — was also successful in bringing back vivid memories.
Dr Julia Donahue, who co-authored, the study, said:
“It is possible that when cues were presented in a random fashion, the emotional content of the cue directed retrieval to a similar memory via shared emotional information.”
The study was published in the journal Memory & Cognition (Sheldon & Donohue, 2017).
Effectively, the internet is taking over from human memory.
Effectively, the internet is taking over from human memory.
Using the internet to look up facts makes us more reliant on it in the future, research finds.
The more times people look up facts online, the less they prefer to rely on their own memories for even the simplest questions.
Psychologists have called this ‘cognitive offloading’.
Effectively, the internet is taking over from human memory.
Dr Benjamin Storm, the study’s first author, said:
“Memory is changing.
Our research shows that as we use the Internet to support and extend our memory we become more reliant on it.
Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don’t bother.
As more information becomes available via smartphones and other devices, we become progressively more reliant on it in our daily lives.”
For the study people were asked a series of challenging trivia questions.
One group was allowed to Google it while the other had to rely on their memory.
Later on both groups were given a series of easier questions to answer and both allowed to use Google if they preferred.
The results showed that those who used the internet before were more likely to use it again.
Remarkably, 30 percent of people who used the internet earlier failed to try and answer any of a series of relatively simple questions from memory.
They preferred to Google it.
Those who had relied on their memory before, though, were more likely to use their own memories again.
This could all be more ammunition for those claiming that the internet is making us stupid.
Professor Evan F. Risko, author of a review of the research on cognitive offloading (Risko & Gilbert, 2016), said:
“If you’re allowed to store some to-be-remembered information on a computer, chances are you won’t devote cognitive real estate to remembering it.
As a result, your ability to remember that information without the computer will likely be reduced.
There’s little doubt that these new technologies are affecting what we remember.”
Or, of course, you could argue it’s just the natural way of things: we use whatever tools work.
Have pencil and paper or calculators really made us that much more stupid?
Or did they ultimately allow us to do more?
The study was published in the journal Memory (Storm et al., 2016).
The doorway effect demonstrates that memory is easily disrupted by both our location and what we are doing.
The doorway effect demonstrates that memory is easily disrupted by both our location and what we are doing.
When passing through doorways, our brains ‘file’ memories away, making it difficult to recall what we were doing, research finds.
It is as though doorways are unconsciously signalling: “That’s enough of that, now we’ll do something different.”
As a result, active memories are shunted out of consciousness.
If you have previously been blaming this on poor memory, then think again.
Professor Gabriel Radvansky, the study’s first author, explained:
“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away.
Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”
For the research, people in the study navigated through a series of virtual rooms and doorways.
Objects in each room were used to test people’s memories.
The results clearly showed that passing through doorways was bad for people’s memory.
The doorway effect shows how our memories are linked to the location we are in.
For example, if you return to your old school, all sorts of memories will flood back from your schooldays.
Often things you haven’t thought about for years, or even decades, will pop into your head.
The study also shows how changing both our physical and mental environment together disrupts memory.
By mental environment here, we mean whatever your plan was in one room.
For example, my plan now is to write this article here in my study.
If I go to make a cup of tea, I change my plan, from writing about this fascinating psychology study to filling the kettle.
At the same time, I am also going from the study to the kitchen.
The doorway effect suggests that when I leave the room, I will also forget what I was doing.
The study was published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (Radvansky et al., 2016).
Why you should celebrate your poor memory.
Why you should celebrate your poor memory.
People with worse memories can enjoy the same experiences more often, research finds.
In contrast, those with the best memories may quickly get tired of the same music, books, places and even people.
Dr Noelle Nelson, the study’s first author, said:
“People with larger working memory capacities actually encode information more deeply.
They remember more details about the things they’ve experienced, and that leads them to feel like they’ve had it more.
That feeling then leads to the ‘large-capacity’ people getting tired of experiences faster.”
For the research, people’s ability to remember strings of numbers and lists of objects was tested.
They were then played music clips and shown pictures to see how quickly they got bored of them.
Dr Nelson explained the results:
“We found that their capacity predicted how fast they got tired of the art or music.
People with larger memory capacities satiated on these things more quickly than people with smaller capacities.
Essentially, large-capacity people perceive that they’ve experienced things more times because they remember those experiences better.”
The graph below shows how people with high memory capacity enjoyed a greater variety of music clips.
Put the other way around: it also shows that people with poorer memories were not as easily bored.
The researchers think the findings could have implications for those struggling with overeating issues.
Dr Nelson said:
“Because a big part of overeating is psychological, a psychological solution such as memory processes could help people control their eating.
Consumers might be able to satiate more quickly by simply recalling the last several times they ate.”
The study was published in The Journal of Consumer Research (Nelson & Redden, 2017).
How false memories from childhood could be implanted.
How false memories from childhood could be implanted.
Fifty per cent of people are prone to believing false memories, research finds.
When totally fictitious (but plausible) events are suggested, around 50% of people then believe they have experienced them.
Examples included taking a hot air balloon ride as a child or causing havoc at a wedding when a child.
The conclusion comes from many ‘memory implantation’ studies that have been carried out over the years.
Typically, in the studies, people are asked to repeatedly imagine the fake events occurring.
They are then tested much later, once the memory has had a chance to settle in.
The result is that people find it very difficult to separate real events from false events.
Psychologists found that of the 50 percent who are susceptible:
Dr Kimberley Wade, an author of the study, said:
“We know that many factors affect the creation of false beliefs and memories — such as asking a person to repeatedly imagine a fake event or to view photos to “jog” their memory.
But we don’t fully understand how all these factors interact.
Large-scale studies like our mega-analysis move us a little bit closer.
The finding that a large portion of people are prone to developing false beliefs is important.
We know from other research that distorted beliefs can influence people’s behaviours, intentions and attitudes.”
The study was published in the journal of Memory (Scoboria et al., 2016).
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