Category: Memory

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

Infants could remember a new skill a day later.

A nap after learning helps a baby consolidate its learning and memories, a new study finds.

The study suggests that a flexible napping schedule could help infants learn.

Dr Jane Herbert, one of the study’s authors, said:

“These findings are particularly interesting to both parents and educationalists because they suggest that the optimal time for infants to learn new information is just before they have a sleep.

Until now people have presumed that the best time for infants to learn is when they are wide-awake, rather than when they are starting to feel tired, but our results show that activities occurring just before infants have a nap can be particularly valuable and well-remembered.”

The study, which is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), involved showing over 200 infants between six- and twelve-months-old how to remove a mitten from a puppet (Seehagen et al., 2015).

They were tested on their newly learned skill 4 hours later and after 24 hours.

Some of the infants napped within four hours of learning while others did not.

The results showed that only infants who napped for at least 30 minutes within four hours of learning could remember how to remove the puppet’s mitten.

Babies that did not nap within four hours could not remember.

Dr Jane Herbert continued:

“Parents receive lots of advice about what they should and shouldn’t do with their baby’s sleep schedule.

This study however examined learning opportunities around naturally occurring naps and shows just how valuable activities like reading books with young children just before they go down to sleep can be.”

The researchers conclude:

“Until now people have presumed that the best time for infants to learn is when they are wide-awake, rather than when they are starting to feel tired, but our results show that activities occurring just before infants have a nap can be particularly valuable and well-remembered.”

Image credit: Paul Goyette

New memory research has important implications for Alzheimer’s disease.

It should be possible to restore the memories of people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, scientists at UCLA have announced.

This is because long-term memory is not stored at the synapses — the connections between brain cells which are destroyed in Alzheimer’s disease — as neuroscientists have long thought.

Professor David Glanzman, who led the study, said:

“Long-term memory is not stored at the synapse.

That’s a radical idea, but that’s where the evidence leads.

The nervous system appears to be able to regenerate lost synaptic connections.

If you can restore the synaptic connections, the memory will come back. It won’t be easy, but I believe it’s possible.”

The conclusions come from research on a type of marine snail called Aplysia, which was published recently in eLife (Chen et al., 2014).

Professor Glanzman explained:

“If you train an animal on a task, inhibit its ability to produce proteins immediately after training, and then test it 24 hours later, the animal doesn’t remember the training.

However, if you train an animal, wait 24 hours, and then inject a protein synthesis inhibitor in its brain, the animal shows perfectly good memory 24 hours later.

In other words, once memories are formed, if you temporarily disrupt protein synthesis, it doesn’t affect long-term memory.

That’s true in the Aplysia and in human’s brains.”

The researchers carried out a number of experiments, all of which suggested that long-term memory was not stored at the synapses as was commonly thought.

Professor Glanzman continued:

“That suggests that the memory is not in the synapses but somewhere else.

We think it’s in the nucleus of the neurons.

We haven’t proved that, though.”

This research could have important implications for those with Alzheimer’s disease, Professor Glanzman believes.

If their research is correct, while the synapses are destroyed by the disease, the memories might still be present.

Glanzman continued:

“As long as the neurons are still alive, the memory will still be there, which means you may be able to recover some of the lost memories in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.”

Image credit: A Health Blog

When you save information digitally, your real memory for that information is worse, but a new study reveals a positive flipside.

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

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.”

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, had participants study a file filled with words they were told to memorise (Storm & Stone, 2014).

Some were told to save the file after studying it, others were not.

They were then given a second file of words to remember.

The results showed that people remembered the words in the second file better when they had saved the first file.

Dr. Storm explained why the trick works:

“The idea is pretty simple: Saving acts as a form of offloading.

By ensuring that certain information will be digitally accessible, we can re-allocate cognitive resources away from maintaining that information and focus instead on remembering new information.”

While saving information makes our memory poorer for that information, at least we know where to find it.

Dr. Storm continued:

“As technology develops, computers and smart phones are making it easier and easier to save information, which seems to have important consequences for the ways in which our memory functions.

By treating computers and other digital devices as extensions of memory, people may be protecting themselves from the costs of forgetting while taking advantage of the benefits.”

Dr. Storm pointed out that forgetting old information may also help us be more creative:

“Coming up with a new idea or solving a problem often requires that we think outside the box, so to speak, and forgetting previous information allows us to do that.

By helping us to reduce the accessibility of old information, saving may facilitate our ability to think of new ideas and solve difficult problems.”

Image credit: A Health Blog

Five-month-olds can remember what they’ve seen when it is paired with this emotion.

Babies can remember what they’ve seen if it is paired with a positive emotion, a new study finds, but nothing otherwise.

The research, carried out by psychologists at Brigham Young University, is the first to look at how being exposed to different emotions affects the memory of infants.

The researchers tested the effect of a positive, negative and neutral tone of voice on which geometric shapes they could remember (Flom et al., 2014).

The five-month-olds in the study obviously couldn’t talk, but their eye gaze was measured to see which way they were looking and for how long.

The infants were tested five minutes after seeing the shapes and one day later — what psychologists consider long-term memory.

The results, published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development, showed that after both five minutes and one day, the infants remembered shapes that were initially paired with a positive voice.

In comparison, they seemed not to remember the shapes paired with neutral or negative voices at all.

Professor Ross Flom, who led the study, said:

“People study memory in infants, they study discrimination in emotional affect, but we are the first ones to study how these emotions influence memory.”

While scientists are not sure why babies remember things paired with positive emotions, they can extrapolate from studies on adults.

Professor Flom explained:

“We think what happens is that the positive affect heightens the babies’ attentional system and arousal.

By heightening those systems, we heighten their ability to process and perhaps remember this geometric pattern.”

Image credit: Paolo Marconi