Category: Memory

Which of the images above is the Apple logo?

If you selected “B” then you did better than 84 out of 85 UCLA students who were asked the same question.

All 84 got it wrong.

And this was in a group in which 52 were exclusively Apple users, while fully 75 owned Apple products.

They were presumably seeing the logo multiple times each day: on their computer, iPads and iPhones.

And yet they couldn’t pick it out of this line-up.

This was despite being very confident beforehand that they would be able to draw it from memory.

Dr Alan Castel, one of the study’s authors, said:

“There was a striking discrepancy between participants’ confidence prior to drawing the logo and how well they performed on the task.

People’s memory, even for extremely common objects, is much poorer than they believe it to be.”

The reason for this discrepancy is that our minds focus on information that’s really important to us, although we don’t realise it.

The details of a corporate logo are not that important in our daily lives.

Our memories tend to store the ‘gist’ of information rather than the specifics.

You’d easily be able to tell the Apple logo from the Windows logo, but drawing both accurately would be a challenge.

The study’s authors write of the classic example that…

“…people often have difficulty recognizing the correct locations of features on a penny.

Although pennies are common objects, people may not have a functional reason for encoding the specific features of currency.

However, people often fail to recall the location of previously seen fire extinguishers, despite the fact that fire extinguishers are in high-visibility locations and are associated with high-risk situations.

Explicit memory is also poor for items that people interact with daily, such as the keypads of calculators, telephones, computer keyboards, the layout of frequently-used elevator buttons, and aspects of road signs.”

So if you feel your memory is poor, then take heart from this study — it just means the stuff you can’t remember isn’t that important to you.

The study is published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (Blake et al., 2015).

Image credit: Adam Blake, Meenely Nazarian, Alan Castel/UCLA Psychology

New research reveals how to ‘turn on’ your memory, how to flush out useless memories and more…

Rounding up some of the latest research on memory, here are five recent studies revealing new insights into how memory works.

(Click the links for longer descriptions of the studies.)

‘Turn on’ your memory

Paying attention isn’t enough to commit things to memory.

Memory has to be ‘turned on’ in order to remember even the simplest details, a recent study f0und.

When not expecting to be tested, people can forget information just one second after paying attention to it.

But, when they expect to be tested, people’s recall is doubled or even tripled.

Dr Brad Wyble, one of the study’s authors, said:

“It is commonly believed that you will remember specific details about the things you’re attending to, but our experiments show that this is not necessarily true.

We found that in some cases, people have trouble remembering even very simple pieces of information when they do not expect to have to remember them.”

Classical music enhances memory genes

Listening to classical music enhances the activity of genes involved in learning and memory.

At the same time it reduces the activity of genes involved in neurodegeneration.

The conclusion comes from the first study to show how music affects the transcription of genes across the whole genome.

Transcription is the first step in how genes are expressed — in other words, how our genetic code is turned into proteins.

Improve memory five-fold

A power nap of under an hour can improve memory performance by five times.

New information normally disappears from memory quite rapidly as people naturally forget.

But, after a 45-60 minute nap, participants in one study had forgotten little.

In comparison those who had remained awake had forgotten a lot.

Flush out useless memories

Clicking ‘save’ on a digital file makes your memory worse for that information, but improves it for what you learn subsequently, a new study has found.

The trick probably works because taking a photo or saving a file flushes the information out of consciousness, freeing up cognitive resources for the next task.

Dr. Benjamin Storm, who led the study, said:

“We tend to think of forgetting as happening when memory fails, but research suggests that forgetting plays an essential role in supporting the adaptive functioning of memory and cognition.”

Recall leads to forgetting

Recalling one memory actually leads to the forgetting of other competing memories, research has confirmed.

It is one of the single most surprising facts about memory, now isolated by neuroscience research.

Although many scientists believed the brain must work this way, this is the first time it has been demonstrated.

Dr Maria Wimber, a cognitive neuroscientist and the study’s first author, said:

“Though there has been an emerging belief within the academic field that the brain has this inhibitory mechanism, I think a lot of people are surprised to hear that recalling memories has this darker side of making us forget others by actually suppressing them.”

Image credit: A Health Blog

How 20 minutes of Mozart affects the expression of genes vital to learning, memory and more…

Listening to classical music enhances the activity of genes involved in learning and memory, a new study finds.

At the same time it reduces the activity of genes involved in neurodegeneration.

It is the first study to show how music affects the transcription of genes across the whole genome.

Transcription is the first step in how genes are expressed — in other words, how our genetic code is turned into proteins.

The study helps to explain the widespread effects of music on the brain.

Music has considerable power to enhance memory, cognitive performance and development, not to mention the emotions.

Classical music study

For the study, 48 participants listened to Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 in G major, K.216:

Blood samples were taken just before they listened to it and just after.

To provide a comparison group, some of the same people also had blood samples taken before and after a non-musical activity on another occasion.

The results showed that classical music enhanced the activity of genes involved in synaptic neurotransmission and dopamine secretion, both of which are important to memory and learning.

On top of this, classical music reduced the activity of genes that are known to be involved in diseases like Parkinson’s.

However, the effects were only seen in musically experience people.

Dr. Irma Järvelä, who led the study, said:

“The effect was only detectable in musically experienced participants, suggesting the importance of familiarity and experience in mediating music-induced effects.”

Some of the genes that were affected by classical music suggest an evolutionary affinity with songbirds, Dr. Järvelä suggested:

“The up-regulation of several genes that are known to be responsible for song learning and singing in songbirds suggest a shared evolutionary background of sound perception between vocalizing birds and humans.”

The study was published in the journal PeerJ (Kanduri et al., 2015).

Music image from Shutterstock

Just 13 grams of this regular food improves brain function across the ages.

Eating a handful of walnuts each day may help improve memory, concentration and the speed at which the brain processes information, a new study finds.

No matter what people’s age, gender or ethnicity, adults who ate walnuts had greater cognitive function, the research found.

The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging, is the first in humans to show that walnuts may have a beneficial effect on cognitive health (Arab & Ang, 2014).

Dr. Lenore Arab, who led the study, said:

“It is exciting to see the strength of the evidence from this analysis across the U.S. population supporting the previous results of animal studies that have shown the neuroprotective benefit from eating walnuts; and it’s a realistic amount – less than a handful per day (13 grams).”

The conclusions come from an analysis of a series of very large US nutritional surveys of a nationally representative sample.

Across the age groups — from 20- to 90-years-old — people who ate more walnuts had improved cognitive performance.

In those over 60, though, the results were particularly encouraging, with boosts in learning and memory of around 7% on average.

Importantly, the study can’t tell us that eating walnuts causes improved cognitive function, but it is suggestive.

This is also not the first study to find a link between walnut consumption and improved cognitive health.

The nut has already been connected to improved brain health in Alzheimer’s disease, but as yet only in a mouse model.

It’s not yet known exactly why walnuts are beneficial, but there are a number of possibilities, as they contain:

• high levels of antioxidants,
• alpha-linolenic acid (ALA),
• and numerous vitamins and minerals.

Dr. Alfonso Ang, the study’s co-author, said:

“It isn’t every day that research results in such simple advice – eating a handful of walnuts daily as a snack, or as part of a meal, can help improve your cognitive health.”

Image credit: Rishi Bandopadhay

Study of 3,000+ finds men and women process emotions differently and this affects what they remember.

Women rate emotional images as more stimulating and are more likely to remember them than men, a new study finds.

While strong emotions tend to boost memory for both men and women, this neuroimaging study may help explain why women often outperform men on memory tests.

The results come from a very large study of 3,398 people who took part in four different trials.

Both men and women were asked to look at a series of pictures, some of which were emotionally arousing and others which were neutral.

They were also tested on their memory for the pictures.

The results, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, showed that women found the emotional pictures — and especially the negative pictures — more stimulating than the men (Spalek et al., 2015).

Dr Klara Spalek, the study’s first author, said:

“This result would support the common belief that women are more emotionally expressive than men.”

Across all the pictures women displayed enhanced recall, and their memory was particularly good for the positive images.

Dr Annette Milnik, who led the study, said:

“This would suggest that gender-dependent differences in emotional processing and memory are due to different mechanisms.”

The researchers then examined brain scans which were taken while people looked at different types of emotional images.

This showed that women’s brains were more active in appraising the negative images than men, especially in the parts of the brain linked to motor functions.

In the image below, the red and yellow areas show the parts of the brain which were more active in both men and women when they looked at emotionally stimulating images.

The green shows the specific areas where women’s brains were more active.

Image credit: Ryan Wiedmaier & MCN, University of Basel