Prospective memory, as psychologists call it, is remembering to do an activity that you have planned.
The food boosted memory, mood and motivation.
The effect that thinking about upcoming stress has on working memory.
The effect that thinking about upcoming stress has on working memory.
Anticipating stress messes with your memory, new research finds.
People who woke up feeling the day would be stressful had worse memory later on, even if the stress did not materialise.
Mr Jinshil Hyun, the study’s first author, said:
“Humans can think about and anticipate things before they happen, which can help us prepare for and even prevent certain events.
But this study suggests that this ability can also be harmful to your daily memory function, independent of whether the stressful events actually happen or not.”
Working memory was the type affected by anticipating stress.
Dr Martin Sliwinski, study co-author, explained its function:
“A reduced working memory can make you more likely to make a mistake at work or maybe less able to focus.
Also, looking at this research in the context of healthy aging, there are certain high stakes cognitive errors that older adults can make.
Taking the wrong pill or making a mistake while driving can all have catastrophic impacts.”
For the study, 240 people were followed over two weeks to measure their stress levels and working memory ability.
Mr Hyun said:
“Having the participants log their stress and cognition as they went about their day let us get a snapshot of how these processes work in the context of real, everyday life.
We were able to gather data throughout the day over a longer period of time, instead of just a few points in time in a lab.”
The more people anticipated stress, the worse their memory was.
Dr Sliwinski said:
“When you wake up in the morning with a certain outlook for the day, in some sense the die is already cast.
If you think your day is going to be stressful, you’re going to feel those effects even if nothing stressful ends up happening.
That hadn’t really been shown in the research until now, and it shows the impact of how we think about the world.”
One option would be to fight the damaging effects of anticipating stress, Dr Sliwinski said:
“If you wake up and feel like the day is going to be stressful, maybe your phone can remind you to do some deep breathing relaxation before you start your day.
Or if your cognition is at a place where you might make a mistake, maybe you can get a message that says now might not be the best time to go for a drive.”
The study was published in the The Journals of Gerontology: Series B (Hyun et al., 2018).
Doing this has the opposite effect than most people expect.
The number of chunks of information we can hold in mind at any one time.
How we breathe affects brain activity, memory and the emotions.
The method was more effective than ‘free recall’, where people remember whatever they can in any order they like.
The method was more effective than ‘free recall’, where people remember whatever they can in any order they like.
Clustered recall is the key to remembering what really happened, new eyewitness research finds.
This means remembering things from one category at a time.
So, if you were trying to remember what you did last Thursday, start with the location and concentrate on that.
Next, remember everything you can about what you were doing, next what people said, and so on.
The new study used the same technique to test people’s memory for a video of a woman being mugged.
Dr Craig Thorley, the study’s author, explained:
“Using this system, we prompt eyewitnesses to first remember what the people involved in the crime looked like, then the what those people did, then the environment the crime took place in.”
The study was designed to help eyewitnesses of crimes remember more.
The usual method is called ‘free recall’, where people remember whatever they can, in whatever order they like.
However, the study found that clustered recall was more effective.
Dr Thorley said:
“I think it’s likely that asking people to focus on one category of information at a time, such as what the people involved looked like, focuses their memory on that category and they offer more details related to it than they otherwise would.”
This method likely relies on the fact that the brain stores and recalls related information together.
Dr Thorley said:
“It’s the first study to compare CCR to free recall.
We interviewed people using both methods and found using CCR produced superior results, with the people using it remembering more correct information about the crime.
It also increased the amount of different details they remembered.”
The study was published in the journal Memory (Thorley, 2018).
Prolonged stress weakens the synapses — the connections between brain cells — in the hippocampus.
Prolonged stress weakens the synapses — the connections between brain cells — in the hippocampus.
Running reverses the damaging effects of chronic stress on critical areas of the brain, new research finds.
Stress can damage the functioning of the hippocampus, a structure of the brain important for memory and learning.
Running, however, protects the brain’s ability to learn and recall information, even under stress.
Dr Jeff Edwards, the study’s first author, said:
“Exercise is a simple and cost-effective way to eliminate the negative impacts on memory of chronic stress.”
Prolonged stress weakens the synapses — the connections between brain cells — in the hippocampus.
The study on mice, though, found that running over a 4-week period negated these negative effects.
Stressed mice who exercised did just as well on a maze-running experiment as non-stressed mice who exercised.
The mice who exercised also had stronger connections between the synapses in their brain.
Naturally, the best memory and learning performance is achieved in a low stress, high exercise environment.
Dr Edwards said:
“The ideal situation for improving learning and memory would be to experience no stress and to exercise.
Of course, we can’t always control stress in our lives, but we can control how much we exercise.
It’s empowering to know that we can combat the negative impacts of stress on our brains just by getting out and running.”
The study was published in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (Roxanne et al., 2018).
The drink helps fight the effects of a high-fat, high-sugar diet.
The drink helps fight the effects of a high-fat, high-sugar diet.
Green tea may help protect against memory problems linked to a poor diet, new research finds.
It could also help brain insulin resistance and reduce obesity.
Dr Xuebo Liu, who led the study, said:
“Green tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world after water, and is grown in at least 30 countries.
The ancient habit of drinking green tea may be a more acceptable alternative to medicine when it comes to combatting obesity, insulin resistance, and memory impairment.”
The conclusions come from a study on mice.
It found that a catechin called EGCG (epigallocatechin-3-gallate) had beneficial effects on the brains of mice.
All were fed a high-fat diet, high-sugar diet analogous to that consumed in many Western countries.
Half, though, were given the EGCG, the active ingredient in green tea.
Those given the EGCG were better able to resist the deleterious effects of the high-sugar, high-fat diet.
They put on less weight and were less cognitively impaired.
Dr Thoru Pederson, Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal in which the study was published, said:
“Many reports, anecdotal and to some extent research-based, are now greatly strengthened by this more penetrating study.”
The study was published in the journal The FASEB Journal (Mi et al., 2017).
Image credit: Arthur
Simply remembering everything that happens to us is not the point of memory.
Simply remembering everything that happens to us is not the point of memory.
Forgetting is the key to having a useful memory, a new psychology paper argues.
Simply remembering everything that happens to us is not the point of memory.
Our memories should help to guide us in making intelligent decisions in the situations we find ourselves.
Dr Blake Richards, one of the study’s authors, said:
“It’s important that the brain forgets irrelevant details and instead focuses on the stuff that’s going to help make decisions in the real world.”
In fact, the brain works hard to forget the right things, said Dr Richards:
“We find plenty of evidence from recent research that there are mechanisms that promote memory loss, and that these are distinct from those involved in storing information.”
The brain forgets by weakening the connections between synapses and through the creation of new neurons.
New neurons ‘delete’ old memories as they create new networks that overwrite what was stored there.
This may help explain why children forget so much: they are producing so many new neurons in the hippocampus.
The process of forgetting is beneficial because it helps us dump outdated or useless information, said Dr Richards:
“If you’re trying to navigate the world and your brain is constantly bringing up multiple conflicting memories, that makes it harder for you to make an informed decision.”
Forgetting also helps us to generalise old information to new situations.
In other words, we get the gist but forget the details and use this to inform future decisions.
What we remember and what we forget comes down partly to the environment we are in.
Dr Richards said:
“One of the things that distinguishes an environment where you’re going to want to remember stuff versus an environment where you want to forget stuff is this question of how consistent the environment is and how likely things are to come back into your life.”
The study was published in the journal Neuron (Richards & Frankland, 2017).
Join the free PsyBlog mailing list. No spam, ever.
