Category: Memory

Time does strange things to your memories.

People’s memories literally fade in vibrancy over time, research finds.

Colours get less vivid, sounds quieter and lights dimmer.

In fact, memory is something like an old printed photograph fading away over the years.

Even emotionally vivid moments — whether positive or negative — still tend to fade away.

Despite this, people generally still remember the gist of memories.

Dr Rose Cooper, the study’s first author, said:

“We found that memories seem to literally fade: people consistently remembered visual scenes as being less vibrant than they were originally experienced.

We had expected that memories would get less accurate after a delay, but we did not expect that there would be this qualitative shift in the way that they were remembered.”

For the study people were shown images that varied in colour saturation and brightness.

When they remembered these photos later on, their memories were consistently less bright and colourful than the originals.

People were more likely to remember negative pictures, but these negative memories had still faded in just the same way.

Dr Cooper said:

“We were also surprised to find that emotional memories did not influence the amount of fading, only the likelihood with which people remembered the images at all.”

Professor Elizabeth Kensinger, study co-author, likened this memory fade out effect to an Instagram filter:

“A simple analogy is what happens when you post a photo on Instagram.

You’re cued to apply a filter that changes the brightness or color saturation of the image.

In our study, we asked if forgetting is like applying a filter to past experience, and whether or not the emotional significance of the event would change which filter you apply.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Cooper et al., 2019).

Researchers measured the brain activity of students while they were typing and while using a keyboard.

People learn more and remember better when writing by hand, research finds.

Multiple studies find that compared with using a keyboard, handwriting makes a more powerful impression on the mind.

Professor Audrey van der Meer, study co-author, said:

“When you write your shopping list or lecture notes by hand, you simply remember the content better afterwards.”

Despite this, handwriting is now being superceded by digital skills in many schools around the world.

Some schools in Norway and many in Finland no longer teach handwriting at all.

Others are likely to follow this trend.

Professor van der Meer said:

“Given the development of the last several years, we risk having one or more generations lose the ability to write by hand. Our research and that of others show that this would be a very unfortunate consequence.”

For the research, Professor van der Meer and colleagues measured the brain activity of students while they were typing and while using a keyboard.

The results clearly showed the brain is more active while writing by hand:

“The use of pen and paper gives the brain more ‘hooks’ to hang your memories on.

Writing by hand creates much more activity in the sensorimotor parts of the brain.

A lot of senses are activated by pressing the pen on paper, seeing the letters you write and hearing the sound you make while writing.

These sense experiences create contact between different parts of the brain and open the brain up for learning. We both learn better and remember better.”

Research from others labs has shown that people remember more when writing by hand than they do when using a keyboard.

Writing by hand also boosts people’s ability to absorb concepts over the long-term.

In other words, people understand more when they take notes by hand.

Professor van der Meer believes learning to write by hand is important:

“Learning to write by hand is a bit slower process, but it’s important for children to go through the tiring phase of learning to write by hand.

The intricate hand movements and the shaping of letters are beneficial in several ways.

If you use a keyboard, you use the same movement for each letter.

Writing by hand requires control of your fine motor skills and senses.

It’s important to put the brain in a learning state as often as possible.

I would use a keyboard to write an essay, but I’d take notes by hand during a lecture.”

Learning to write by hand is beneficial for the brain’s development, says Professor van der Meer:

“The brain has evolved over thousands of years.

It has evolved to be able to take action and navigate appropriate behavior.

In order for the brain to develop in the best possible way, we need to use it for what it’s best at.

We need to live an authentic life.

We have to use all our senses, be outside, experience all kinds of weather and meet other people.

If we don’t challenge our brain, it can’t reach its full potential.

And that can impact school performance,”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Askvik et al., 2020).

The things you can do to preserve your memory.

Education and more social activities are two ways to maintain a healthy memory, new research finds.

In addition, novel cognitive activities, like learning a new language, are also linked to a more healthy memory.

These are among the ways that people can protect themselves against declining memory.

Other protective factors for memory include maintaining a healthy weight, good self-maintenance and living with a companion.

Dr Peggy McFall, the study’s first author, said:

“We found different risk factors for stable memory and for rapidly declining memory.

It may be possible to use these factors to improve outcomes for older adults.”

The conclusions come from a study of 882 older adults whose memories were tested.

The researchers looked at things that can and cannot be changed by individuals.

The results showed that people with healthy memories tended to be educated, female and engage in more social activities.

They were also more likely to try novel cognitive activities.

Dr McFall said:

“These modifiable risk and protective factors may be converted to potential intervention targets for the dual purpose of promoting healthy memory aging or preventing or delaying accelerated decline, impairment, and perhaps dementia.”

The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (McFall et al., 2019).

What predicts why you remember some information and forget the rest?

The brain has to be ready to remember information or it is likely to be forgotten.

The hippocampus — the part of the brain important for memory — has to be in ‘encoding mode’.

In encoding mode, neurons in the hippocampus are firing at an accelerated rate.

Unfortunately, neuroscientists do not yet know how to put the hippocampus into encoding mode.

Professor John Wixted, study co-author, said:

“‘Encoding mode’, is more than simply paying attention to the task at hand.

It is paying attention to encoding, which selectively ramps up activity in the part of the brain that is the most important for making new memories: the hippocampus.

Since we know, based on earlier research, that people can actively suppress memory formation, it might be possible for people to get their hippocampus ready to encode as well.

But how one might go about doing that, we just don’t know yet.”

The conclusions come from a study of 34 epilepsy patients.

They were shown a series of words while the neuronal activity in various critical parts of their brain was monitored.

The results showed that the neuronal firing rate observed in the hippocampus about one second before a word was seen boosted its later recall.

Professor Stephen Goldinger, study co-author, said:

“If a person’s hippocampal neurons were already firing above baseline when they saw or heard a word, their brain was more likely to successfully remember that word later.”

Neuronal activity in other areas of the brain did not predict recall.

Professor Goldinger said:

“We think new memories are created by sparse collections of active neurons, and these neurons get bundled together into a memory.

This work suggests that when a lot of neurons are already firing at high levels, the neuronal selection process during memory formation works better.”

Neuroscientists have also suggested the brain has a ‘retrieval mode’ for when we want to recall memories.

Another study on those with epilepsy has shown that, like the encoding of memories, the neurons start to activate a second or more before people are aware of retrieving a memory.

The study was published in the journal PNAS (Urgolites et al., 2020).

It is possible to make some memories stronger while leaving others to fade.

The strongest memories are created by very rewarding and demanding experiences, new research reveals.

However, we make these memories still stronger by replaying them repeatedly in our minds.

Each time a memory is recalled and re-lived, the neuronal activity that sustains it is strengthened.

This means that we actually edit our memories by what we choose to recall and replay.

Keep running over distressing incidents and these become stronger.

Remembering happier times, though, makes these memories stronger.

Most people (but not all) have a tendency to forget the negative and replay the positive.

This bias is sometimes called ‘the psychological immune system’.

Our minds ‘fight off’ negative memories automatically to leave us feeling happier — or at least, that is the theory.

Professor Fabian Kloosterman, study co-author, said:

“One of the ways in which our brains consolidate memories is by mentally reliving the experience.

In biological terms, this boils down to the reactivation or replay of the neuronal activity patterns associated with a certain experience.

This replay occurs in hippocampal-cortical brain networks during rest or sleep.”

For the study, rats were trained to remember where food was located in a maze.

Mr Frédéric Michon, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that rats remembered better the location where they found the large reward.

But we also observed that this reward-related effect on memory was strongest when the food pellets were located in places that required more complex memory formation.”

The scientists then disrupted the rats’ memories before they could be consolidated.

This is the human equivalent to winning the lottery, but never thinking about it again.

The effect was to impair the rats’ memory.

If they couldn’t replay the memory to themselves about where the food pellet was, they found it harder to remember.

Professor Kloosterman said:

“Our results demonstrate that replay contributes to the finely tuned selective consolidation of memories.

Such insights could open future opportunities for treatments that help to strengthen memories, and could also help us understand memory decline in diseases such as dementia.”

The study was published in the journal Current Biology (Michon et al., 2019).