Researchers at the University of Basel have now found that green tea extract can improve working memory (Schmidt et al., 2014).
Working memory is vital to holding pieces of visual, verbal or other information in your mind while you manipulate them.
Better working memory has been linked to improved learning, attention and other vital outcomes.
Synaptic functioning
In their study, participants were given a drink which sometimes contained green tea extract and were then asked to complete a series of tests of their working memory.
Either way the drink looked and tasted the same, whether or not it contained green tea extract.
Meanwhile, their brains were scanned to see how the green tea affected synaptic functioning.
What the researchers found was that not only did participants do better on the tests after ingesting the green tea, but that it enhanced the connections between the frontal and parietal regions of the brain.
The findings are interesting especially for older adults, as a series of studies have suggested green tea may be beneficial in this area:
“…consumption of green tea improved memory and attention in subjects with mild cognitive impairments and that the consumption of flavonoid-rich foods such as green tea reduced beta-amyloid-mediated cognitive impairments.
[…]
Furthermore, higher consumption of green tea has also been associated with a lower prevalence of cognitive impairments in older adults.” (Schmidt et al., 2014).
Why we remember and why we forget: it’s context, fading emotions, deep processing, the ‘Google effect’, the reminiscence bump and way more…
Why we remember and why we forget: it’s context, fading emotions, deep processing, the ‘Google effect’, the reminiscence bump and way more…
Many people say they have bad memories, but the majority are wrong.
The way memory works can be unexpected, frustrating, wonderful, and even quirky — but not necessarily ‘bad’.
For most of us the problem isn’t with our memories, it’s with understanding how memory works.
Here are ten interesting quirks of memory which provide a better insight into what makes us remember — or forget.
1. Context is king
What we can remember partly depends on the situation and mental state we are in at the time.
This is because our memories work by association.
The context itself can refer to all kinds of things: some things are easier to remember in a certain place, others when we experience specific smells, others when we are in particular emotional states.
One striking study which demonstrates this had deep sea divers learning lists of words either 15ft underwater or on dry land (Godden & Baddeley, 1975).
It turned out that when they learned words underwater, they remembered 32% of them when tested underwater, but only 21% when tested on the beach.
Of course our memories are far more complex than lists of words: many will have all kinds of contextual hooks, but the study neatly makes the point that for memory, context is very important.
2. Google remembers for you
If you’ve ever worried about the effect the internet is having on your mind, then this aspect of memory would seem to fuel those worries.
The ‘Google effect’ is the finding that we tend to forget things which we know we can look up on the internet.
In a study by Sparrow et al. (2011) participants were manipulated into thinking they could either retrieve items they were supposed to recall from a computer, or that the items had been irrevocably deleted.
The results showed that people’s memory was worse for things they thought they could look up.
Crucially, though, despite the fact that people’s memory was worse when they could access the information, they were better at knowing where to find it.
Given that you can look most stuff up on the internet, doesn’t that mean we’ll eventually forget almost everything?
Lead author of the study, Betsy Sparrow, doesn’t see this as the beginning of the end, rather a ‘reorganisation of the way we remember things’:
“Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”
So it’s not a step backwards, but an evolution in how memory works.
3. Negative emotions fade faster
This is a simple — and wonderful — quirk of how memory works.
It’s the fact that, on average, negative emotions are forgotten quicker than positive.
A typical study asks people to write about things that have happened to them over a period of months.
Then they are asked to recall these events up to five years later.
A curious thing happens for most (non-depressed) people: the negative things are forgotten at a higher rate than the positive.
Psychologists aren’t exactly sure why this happens, but it seems to be part of our natural psychological immune system which helps protect against life’s inevitable knocks.
4. Deep processing
This is a very obvious and intuitive quirk of memory, but nonetheless continually ignored by generations of students and others who are trying to learn.
It’s the fact that the deeper a fact or memory is processed, the greater the chance of it being recalled later.
A classic study had people trying to memorise a list of words (Craik & Tulving, 1975).
Some were told to focus on surface details, like the sound of the words or how they were written. Another group, though, had to process the meaning.
You’ll be unsurprised to learn that those who thought about the meaning of the words did the best on a subsequent test.
And yet, students and other learners continue to revise by rote or by just focusing on surface details.
Looking for deeper connections is the way to more strongly fix memories in the mind.
5. Memory distortion
When a memory is ‘misattributed’ some original true aspect of a memory becomes distorted through time, space or circumstances.
Some examples that have been studied in the lab are:
Misattributing the source of memories. In one study participants with ‘normal’ memories regularly made the mistake of thinking they had acquired a trivial fact from a newspaper, when actually the experimenters had supplied it (Schacter, Harbluk, & McLachlan, 1984).
Misattributing a face to the wrong context. Studies have shown that memories can become blended together, so that faces and circumstances are merged.
Memory expert Daniel Schacter suggests that misattributions may actually be useful to us (Schacter, 1999).
The ability to extract, abstract and generalise our experience enables us to apply lessons we’ve learnt in one domain to another.
6. The Zeigarnik effect
The Zeigarnik effect is named after a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, who noticed an odd thing while sitting in a restaurant in Vienna.
The waiters seemed only to remember orders which were in the process of being served. When completed, the orders evaporated from their memory.
Zeigarnik went back to the lab to test out a theory about what was going on.
She asked participants to do twenty or so simple little tasks in the lab, like solving puzzles and stringing beads (Zeigarnik, 1927). Except some of the time they were interrupted half way through the task.
Afterwards she asked them which activities they remembered doing.
People were about twice as likely to remember the tasks during which they’d been interrupted than those they completed.
The Zeigarnik effect, therefore, is that incomplete tasks are remembered better than completed ones.
It’s pretty easy to see why that might be a useful quirk of memory.
7. Childhood amnesia
Most adults can’t remember much, if anything, from before the age of three.
A new study of childhood memory reveals that childhood amnesia sets in at around the age of seven (Bauer & Larkina, 2013).
The results showed that between 5 and 7 years-of-age, the children could remember between 63% and 72% of the events they’d first recalled at the age of three.
However, by the age of 8 or 9, the children only remembered about 35% of the events.
When children are young the hippocampus–a part of the brain crucial to memory–is still undergoing neurogenesis: new neurons are constantly being produced.
Until this process is complete we find it hard to lay down long-term autobiographical memories.
8. The reminiscence bump
While we may remember little from before around the age of seven, the teenage and early adult years are a completely different matter.
Between about 10 and 30-years-old, most adults experience some of the biggest moments in their lives, all in relatively quick succession.
There’s education, puberty, falling in love, deciding on a career, getting married, having a first child and so on.
While life’s later years can be full of happiness and fulfilment, it’s in these two decades when most people experience the largest changes to their identities, goals and life circumstances.
Naturally, then, people tend to remember this period most intensely — that is the ‘reminiscence bump’, named after the bump on the graph of people’s retrieval of autobiographical memories (in red below).
9. The consistency bias
New experiences don’t fall on a blank slate; we don’t merely record the things we see around us.
Instead everything we do, have done to us, think or experience, is affected by past thoughts and things that have already happened to us.
One strong psychological drive humans have is to be consistent.
This, then, can lead to a consistency bias: we have a tendency to reconstruct the past to make it more compatible with our current world-view.
For example, as people get older, on average, they get politically more conservative.
Despite this people report always having had roughly the same views (Markus, 1986).
10. The recall effect
Many memories which have the scent of authenticity may turn out to be misremembered, if not totally fictitious events, if only we could check.
But, does the long passage of time warp the memory, or is there some more active process that causes the change?
In one experiment participants had memories laid down in a carefully controlled way to test this out (St. Jacques & Schacter, 2013).
The results showed that people’s memories were both enhanced and distorted by the process of recall. This shows that merely recalling a memory is enough to strengthen it.
This is one aspect of the fact that memory is an active, reconstructive process; recalling something is not a neutral act, it strengthens that memory in comparison to the others.
A good memory
Hopefully these ‘quirks’ of memory help to underline the fact that some of what we think of as the disadvantages of memory are really strengths.
As the great psychologist William James said:
“If we remembered everything we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”
“I hear, and I forget; I see, and I remember” –Chinese proverb
“I hear, and I forget; I see, and I remember” –Chinese proverb
Our memory for things we’ve seen or touched is much better than for what we’ve heard, a new study reveals.
The study had people listening to a variety of sounds, shown pictures and given things to touch (Begelo & Poremba, 2014).
The researchers found that it was the things people heard that they were most likely to forget, more than things they had seen or touched.
This study provides a fascinating insight into how memory works.
Lead author James Bigelow explains:
“We tend to think that the parts of our brain wired for memory are integrated. But our findings indicate our brain may use separate pathways to process information. Even more, our study suggests the brain may process auditory information differently than visual and tactile information, and alternative strategies — such as increased mental repetition — may be needed when trying to improve memory.”
In the study people were exposed to all sorts of everyday sounds, sights and tactile experiences.
They watched basketball games, heard dogs barking and touched a coffee mug that was hidden from view.
Whether it was an hour later or a week later, people’s recall was similar for things they’d seen or touched, but significantly worse for those they’d heard.
Previous studies have found that hearing sounds and words together can aid memory
Studies on chimpanzees and monkeys also show that their auditory memory is worse than tactile or visual memory.
Here are graphs showing how humans, chimps and monkeys forget depending on whether the source is auditory or visual:
This suggests that our poorer memory for things we’ve heard has its root in the evolution of the primate brain.
Could memories of drug abuse or trauma be selectively erased?
Could memories of drug abuse or trauma be selectively erased?
For some people–those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or substance abuse problems–erasing unwanted memories is more than just an idle wish.
With these people in mind, a recent study by scientists at the Scripps Research Institute has managed to selectively erase the memories of mice (Young et al., 2013).
Researchers gave methamphetamine to the mice so that they began to associate the feel-good drug with a particular type of environment filled with novel and interesting tastes, sights and smells.
It’s a bit like how clubbers learn to associate going to a club with taking drugs.
The mice learned that when they were in a particularly exciting context, they should press a lever to get a dose of methamphetamine.
After they’d learnt the habit, the mice were injected with a type of memory inhibitor that affects memories associated with methamphetamine.
Later, when the mice were returned to the exciting environment, they showed little interest in the lever which doled out methamphetamine.
Apparently they’d forgotten the association.
At the same time, tests showed that their other memories were unaffected–the memory inhibitor had selectively erased only the drug-related memories.
One of the researchers, Courtney Miller, explained:
“Not unlike in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we’re looking for strategies to selectively eliminate evidence of past experiences related to drug abuse or a traumatic event. Our study shows we can do just that in mice–wipe out deeply engrained drug-related memories without harming other memories.”
People often think of memory as fragile, but remaining relatively unchanged after it is initially laid down.
This is far from the truth.
In fact memories can be manipulated after the event by changes in the way they are recalled.
For example, if you recall a past embarrassing event over and over again, it will become stronger.
If, instead, you recall a happy moment again, that will become stronger.
Just by recalling (or not recalling) a memory, its relative strength is changing in relation to other memories.
Memories related to powerful drugs, however, are not so easily forgotten, which is why these researchers hope that this type of chemical treatment may eventually be beneficial for those with substance abuse disorders.
New memories can be edited and spliced into old ones, according to a new study.
New memories can be edited and spliced into old ones, according to a new study.
A new study demonstrates that the way memory works is far from the popular imagination of a video camera; in fact new and old memories are continually being cut-up, edited and spliced together.
The study, conducted by neuroscientists at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, demonstrates how current memories can be inserted into older ones (Bridge & Voss, 2014).
The lead author of the study, Donna Jo Bridge, used the example of falling in love:
“When you think back to when you met your current partner, you may recall this feeling of love and euphoria. But you may be projecting your current feelings back to the original encounter with this person.”
In the study, participants were shown objects located on the computer screen paired with certain backgrounds.
They were then asked to place the same objects in the same locations on the screen–but there were different backgrounds than they’d seen before.
In a third trial participants had to choose between three locations on the screen, either where they’d appeared the first time, where they’d chosen the second time, or a new location.
Bridge explained the results:
“People always chose the location they picked in part 2. This shows their original memory of the location has changed to reflect the location they recalled on the new background screen. Their memory has updated the information by inserting the new information into the old memory.”
While they were carrying out these tests, participants’ brains were scanned and their eye movements tracked.
The study’s other author, Joel Voss, explained the results:
“Everyone likes to think of memory as this thing that lets us vividly remember our childhoods or what we did last week. But memory is designed to help us make good decisions in the moment and, therefore, memory has to stay up-to-date. The information that is relevant right now can overwrite what was there to begin with.”
It’s a mystery: men report their memory is worse than women.
It’s a mystery: men report their memory is worse than women.
A new study finds for the first time that men, on average, think they are more forgetful than women.
The results come from a large study of 48,000 people, conducted in Norway (Holmen et al., 2013).
In the study, people were asked nine questions about how good they think their memory is.
The questions asked included:
Whether they had problems remembering names and dates.
How good they were at remembering details of conversations.
If they could remember what they were doing one year ago.
For eight of the nine questions men reported more problems with their memory.
Professor Jostein Holmen, the lead author of the study, explained the results:
“It was surprising to see that men forget more than women. This has not been documented before. It was also surprising to see that men are just as forgetful whether they are 30 or 60 years old. The results were unambiguous.”
The explanation for these findings is beyond them. Holmen said:
“We have speculated a lot about why men report more frequent problems with remembering than women do, but have not been able to find an explanation. This is still an unsolved mystery.”
Across all the categories of questions it was names and dates that people found the hardest to remember.
Naturally the study only looks at people’s perception of how good or bad their memory is–it is not an objective measure.
Still, the importance of looking at subject memory impairment is to see if it might predict cognitive problems in the future, like dementia.
More than two or three drinks a day damages men’s memory.
More than two or three drinks a day damages men’s memory.
A new study has found that men drinking heavily in mid-life experience faster declines in their cognitive abilities.
The study, published in the journal Neurology, found that men who drank the equivalent of 2.5 drinks per day showed faster declines with age (Sabia et al., 2014).
Some people may be surprised just how low the bar is set for ‘heavy’ drinking. What this study calls ‘heavy’ drinking, many would consider ‘moderate’.
Below this level there was little difference in cognitive health between those who abstained and those who had two or less drinks per day.
The study also included women, but there was little evidence of any increased decline in cognitive health from alcohol consumption.
Although moderate drinking is often considered relatively harmless, some recent studies on rats are not so comforting.
A Rutgers University study gave rats the equivalent of five drinks for men and 3-4 for women (Anderson et al., 2012). This is the amount that puts you on the legal driving limit in the US.
The rats’ brains showed a 40% drop in the number of nerve cells in the hippocampus
The study’s lead author, Megan Anderson, explained:
“If this area of your brain was affected every day over many months and years, eventually you might not be able to learn how to get somewhere new or to learn something new about your life. It’s something that you might not even be aware is occurring.”
Mindfulness is an effective antidote to mind-wandering.
Mindfulness is an effective antidote to mind-wandering.
If you can’t concentrate on a book, can’t sit quietly for 15 minutes or can barely make it through a blog post, then you’re not alone.
It’s the modern way–and we hear more and more people saying their attention span and memory are being eroded.
Maybe, they say, it’s the internet, or maybe it’s down to genes and personality.
Whatever the cause, a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science demonstrates that it can change.
Being mindful
In the research, 48 participants were assigned either to a mindfulness class or to a course on nutrition (Mrazek et al., 2013).
Both courses were only two weeks long and the classes met for 45 minutes over 8 sessions.
Students in the mindfulness group were asked to practice mindfulness outside the class and to apply what they’d learned to their everyday life.
The results of the study were striking. Those who’d practised mindfulness:
had better short-term memory,
improved their score on a verbal reasoning test,
and experienced less mind-wandering.
The researchers discovered that it was the last effect–the reduction in mind-wandering–that was responsible for the improved memory and reasoning.
It stands to reason: when your mind isn’t distracted and jumping around so much, it’s easier to keep things in short-term memory and to give a task your full attention.
The lead author, Michael Mrazek, explained:
“This is the most complete and rigorous demonstration that mindfulness can reduce mind-wandering, one of the clearest demonstrations that mindfulness can improve working memory and reading, and the first study to tie all this together to show that mind-wandering mediates the improvements in performance.”
Practice makes a perfect mind
One of the fascinating aspects of the study is that people’s scores increased on a test that is supposed to be uncoachable.
The test, the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) is a standardised test for fixed abilities.
But, if people are improving their scores after such a short intervention, it’s demonstrating that these kinds of cognitive abilities are not as fixed as is generally thought.
The second fascinating aspect of the study is the broad effect of the intervention.
Typically, people who do ‘brain training’ exercises get better at those specific brain training exercises but not much else.
For example, if you do loads of Sudoku or crossword puzzles, you get better at those specific activities, but these improvements generally doesn’t reach into other areas.
But here a mindfulness intervention was having a broad effect on memory, verbal skills and concentration.
The reason it works is because it dampens down mind wandering, our natural tendency to daydream, time-travel and generally goof off.
Psychologists call the neural structures that underlie this effect the ‘default network’.
The mind’s ‘default network’ is not a bad thing in itself, but it shouldn’t interfere when we want to concentrate:
“…mindfulness training leads to reduced activation of the default network, a collection of brain regions that typically show greater activation at rest than during externally directed cognitive tasks. Both long-term meditators and individuals who have completed 2 weeks of mindfulness training show reduced activation of the default network.” (Mrazek et al., 2013).
The six steps to mindfulness
For those of you who’d like to try this at home, here’s what the mindfulness classes involved:
“(a) sitting in an upright posture with legs crossed and gaze lowered,
(b) distinguishing between naturally arising thoughts and elaborated thinking,
(c) minimizing the distracting quality of past and future concerns by reframing them as mental projections occurring in the present,
(d) using the breath as an anchor for attention during meditation,
(e) repeatedly counting up to 21 consecutive exhalations
(f ) allowing the mind to rest naturally rather than trying to suppress the occurrence of thoughts.”
Music aids language learning, helps injured brains remember, causes widespread brain activation and more…
Music and memory: it aids language learning, helps injured brains remember, causes widespread brain activation and more…
Music and memory have a tremendously strong link.
Hearing an old song can take you back decades in the blink of an eye.
Psychologists have been fascinated by this connection between music and memory.
Here are five recent psychology studies which demonstrate the intimate link between music and memory.
1. Singing aids language learning
The link between music and memory is so strong that it can help you learn a foreign language.
Research by Ludke et al. (2013) found that people trying to learn Hungarian, a notoriously difficult language, performed much better if they sang the Hungarian phrases rather than just saying them.
The researchers think that the melody may provide an extra cue which helps embed the memory.
2. Music and memory: the injured brain
People who have suffered traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), such as in a car accident, often have problems with memory.
Music is increasingly being tested as a way to help bring back forgotten autobiographical memories.
A recent study had participants who had suffered severe TBIs listening to number-one songs from their lifetimes to see what memories were evoked (Baird & Sampson, 2013).
The memories brought back were mostly of people or a period of their lives and were broadly similar to those evoked by control participants who did not have a TBI.
Compared with using a standardised interview–the Autobiographical Memory Interview–playing number-one hits to people who’d suffered TBIs was more effective in eliciting memories.
3. Widespread brain activation
One of the reasons the link between music and memory is so powerful is that it activates such large areas of the brain.
A recent brain imaging study found that music activated the auditory, motor and limbic (emotional) regions (Alluri et al., 2013).
The study found that whether their participants were listening to the Beatles or Vivaldi, largely the same areas of the brain were active.
The motor areas process the rhythm, the auditory areas process the sound, while the limbic regions are associated with the emotions (Alluri et al., 2013).
4. Music can take you back two generations
Classic hits can easily take you back to your teens and twenties.
Most people have particularly strong memories of this time in their lives–psychologists have called it the ‘reminiscence bump’.
But, perhaps surprisingly, one study has shown that people also have mini reminiscence bumps for the music their parents listened to, and even for their grandparents’ music (Krumhansl & Zupnick, 2013).
The study’s lead author, Carol Lynne Krumhansl, explained:
“Music transmitted from generation to generation shapes autobiographical memories, preferences, and emotional responses, a phenomenon we call cascading ‘reminiscence bumps’.
“These new findings point to the impact of music in childhood and likely reflect the prevalence of music in the home environment.”
Another study has shown that we don’t even need to hear the tune to active the link between music and memory–the words are enough (Cady et al., 2008).
For a whole generation, the words “Ice, ice baby”, and for another generation “…living in the gangsta’s paradise” are enough to take them back in time.
5. A unique musical hallucination
The power of the link between music and memory is sometimes frightening.
A recent study from Frontiers in Neurology reported the case of a woman who, one night, suddenly began to hear music playing in her head, like a sort of internal, unstoppable jukebox (Vitorovic & Biller, 2013). The problem continued for months.
When she hummed the songs to her husband, he recognised some of them, but she herself didn’t know what they were or where they came from.
It seemed the songs were so deeply rooted in her memory that she wasn’t consciously aware she knew them. They only came to the surface during these night-time hallucinations.
She was treated with an anti-seizure medication and her symptoms improved a little.
This is the only known case of this kind of musical hallucination.
Three-month-long experiment demonstrates the importance of challenging new activities for older minds.
Three-month-long experiment demonstrates the importance of challenging new activities for older minds.
Older people are often advised to keep active for cognitive health, but passive activities like listening to music or doing puzzles may not be enough.
According to a recent study published in Psychological Science, in order to boost cognition, activities need to be active and mentally taxing.
In their study, Park et al. (2013) randomly divided 221 people aged between 60 and 90 into a series of groups:
One group took up photography or quilting, or both, and engaged in the activity for 15 hours a week over three months.
One control group took part in social activities like playing games or watching movies, but did not learn any new skills.
Another control group completed word puzzles or listened to classical music.
After three months those who had been learning photography or quilting showed improved memory function.
In comparison those listening to music, doing puzzles or engaging in social activities had not improved.
This study clearly shows the importance of engaging with taxing activities, especially in later years. The lead author Denise Park explained:
“It seems it is not enough just to get out and do something–it is important to get out and do something that is unfamiliar and mentally challenging, and that provides broad stimulation mentally and socially. When you are inside your comfort zone you may be outside of the enhancement zone.”
This is one of only a handful of studies to experimentally show the benefits keeping an active mind.
Previous studies have been correlational: in other words they have only an association between staying mentally active and improved cognitive skills.
The problem with these sorts of studies is we don’t know that it’s staying mentally active that is really causing older minds to be sharper. It could be, for example, that people whose minds are sharper are more likely to take on more challenging activities.
However, this study is good evidence that it’s actually the mentally stimulating activities with which people are engaging that really is causing the improvements in memory.
‘Successful’ ageing
It’s also a great study because it includes activities people might actually enjoy!
Who wants to sit, slogging away at brain training apps when you could be doing something fun like photography?
And, of course, it doesn’t have to be photography, it just has to be something which requires your active mental engagement.
It’s interesting to note, though, that in this study learning photography was more beneficial than the quilting, probably because it requires learning so much new information. Quilting, on the other hand, after the initial learning, is mostly a procedural skill.
With the average age in countries around increasing, these types of findings will become more and more important:
“…unlike computer training, productive engagement has the potential to be self-reinforcing and propagate continued learning and intellectual stimulation. […] The present results provide some of the first experimental evidence that learning new things and keeping the mind engaged may be an important key to successful cognitive aging…” (Park et al., 2013)
