Answers to questions about memory Here are the answers to some of the more common questions about memory. They cover:
If you prefer, you can also explore these questions in a floating word cloud. (requires Flash 7)
You've probably heard the phrase 'use it or lose it' along with the idea that exercising your mind might help keep it healthy and stave off dementia. But is there any evidence that this works?
In 2002, Chicago researchers published a study involving 700 dementia-free elderly subjects who were followed for more than four years. They concluded that there was sufficient evidence to suggest that engaging in stimulating everyday cognitive activities such as reading, solving crossword puzzles, visiting museums and playing card games corresponded with a significantly reduced risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.
One study doesn't tell the whole story and the factors involved in developing dementia are complex and multi-faceted but it certainly gives support to the idea that our brains can be exercised to help improve or tone up the way we think and ultimately, the way we remember.
The text above is an excerpt from Radio 4's 'Memory experience'. Read the full article about the 'use it or lose it' theory on the Radio 4 website.
Back to top of page 
A false memory is not the same as lying - the subject really does believe what they think they remember. It's just that the memory is false.
False memory has become an important area of psychological research and also a controversial one. In the early 1990s, several landmark legal cases in the United States centred on the issue of recovered memory. Recovered memories occur when a victim of some sort of trauma, such as child abuse, recovers a suppressed memory often with the help of psychotherapy. A wave of recovered memory cases prompted research psychologist Elizabeth Loftus to investigate whether or not it was possible to tell if a memory was of a real or imagined event.
After generating some positive results in the lab, showing that it was possible to make people recall things that they had never actually experienced, Loftus wanted to see if this would work in the real world. She volunteered to assist a public defender in a supposed 'open and shut' murder case. In the end, Loftus was able to show how memories of the events surrounding the crime could easily be manipulated through careful questioning of witnesses. The result was eventual acquittal for the defendant.
The text above is an excerpt from Radio 4's 'Memory experience'. Read the full article about false memory on the Radio 4 website.
Back to top of page
Some tunes are so catchy that they are greeted with a mixture of joy and dread when they drift out of a nearby radio.
Scientists at Dartmouth College in the US believe they've found the bit of our brains that makes us sing a song over and over again.
Volunteers listened to familiar and unfamiliar songs with short segments cut out while having their brains scanned, in an experiment reported to the journal Nature. The listeners told the Dartmouth researchers that they heard the familiar songs in their heads, even when there was no sound.
When the researchers looked at the functional magnetic resonance scans, they found that the familiar tunes activated a specific area of the volunteers' auditory cortices (the part of the brain that deals with signals from the ears). When the unfamiliar tunes were played the same area stayed relatively quiet.
Interestingly, familiar tunes with lyrics activated a more advanced area of the volunteers' auditory cortices while familiar tunes without lyrics areas relied on areas deeper in the same part of the brain. This finding suggests that the meaning we draw from lyrics plays a role in making a song stick in our heads.
Related links:
(.PDF Nature)
How tunes get stuck in your
head (³ÉÈËÂÛ̳)
'Brain itch' keeps songs in the
head (³ÉÈËÂÛ̳)
Back to top of page
Our emotions and our memories are inexorably linked. On one level, emotional memory simply refers to the notion that very emotional events are often memorable. As you might expect, we're more likely to remember emotionally charged images (for example the scene of a car crash or of someone crying) than neutral ones. Furthermore, we're more likely to remember any image if we ourselves are in a state of heightened emotion.
Emotional memory can also refer to how an object, event or even a person can make us feel by triggering an existing memory that has emotional significance. For example, you might instantly take a liking to someone at a party because their perfume or aftershave is the same as that of your spouse or partner.
'Flashbulb' memories are another example of how emotion and memory are connected. The term refers to the phenomenon of knowing where you were and what you were doing at the time that you learned about a major and often shocking public event, such as the death of John F Kennedy, the September 11 attacks, or England winning the World Cup. Thanks to its emotional underpinning, the event is now bound up in your memory with what you were doing at the time you heard it.
The text above is an excerpt from Radio 4's 'Memory experience'. Read the full article about emotional memory on the Radio 4 website.
Back to top of page
Amnesia is a term used to cover the partial or complete loss of memory. It's usually associated with either physical trauma such as a blow to the head or some sort of psychological trauma. It is usually a temporary condition and tends to affect only a certain part of a person's experience. Amnesia can also be caused by specific medical conditions such as a brain tumour, a stroke or a swelling of the brain. Memory loss can also be experienced by those suffering the effects of chronic alcohol abuse.
The text above is an excerpt from Radio 4's 'Memory experience'. Read the full article about amnesia on the Radio 4 website.
Back to top of page
You may have heard someone say we only use 10% of our brains. But it turns out this often repeated 'fact' isn't true.
As Dr Barry L Beyerstein points out in the book Mind Myths, if 90% of the brain is unused, it should be possible to damage large parts of someone’s brain without affecting their behaviour. However, there is essentially no part of the brain that can be damaged without corresponding changes in behaviour. Scientists know this from studying stroke patients and people with head wounds.
Another reason scientists doubt the 10% claim is that brains scans show activity across our brains, even when we're sleeping.
Finally, ponder this question: why would the human brain, an organ that requires a lot of the body's resources to function, evolve over millions of years and wind up being so inefficient?
Related links:
(Brainconnection.com)
Back to top of page
In a 2003 University of Chicago study, 12 volunteers were asked to listen to words played through a voice synthesiser, and they also saw them printed on a piece of paper. The audio was intentionally difficult to understand.
Later, the volunteers were asked to recall the words based on the garbled audio alone. Many found their ability to remember suffered as the day wore on.
The next day, the volunteers were asked to listen to the words again. After a full night's sleep, they were able to recall words they had forgotten the day before.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, the scientists concluded that sleep allows the brain to consolidate new memories and even repair memories that have been damaged.
Related links:
Quality sleep 'rescues memories' (³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News)
Sleep (³ÉÈËÂÛ̳)
How memories build during sleep (³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News)
Sleeping on it works (³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News)
Back to top of page
Smells can instantly bring back emotions and memories pushed to the backs of our brains.
When we breathe in an odour molecule, it is detected by a set of protein receptors located on cells in the upper part of the nose. Each receptor is a specialist – they can only recognise a few types of odour each. When you breathe in a smell that transports you to your childhood – the smell of baking bread, for example – the receptor cells send messages along tiny strands of nerve tissue to a part of the brain called the olfactory bulb.
The messages arrive at different areas within the olfactory bulb and then whiz off to the parts of the brain called the amygdala (controls emotion) and the hippocampus (controls memory storage). It is here that the brain recognises a signal pattern as a particular smell and a memory or emotion may be triggered.
Related links:
New clues to remembering smells (³ÉÈËÂÛ̳)
Secrets of smell land Noble Prize (³ÉÈËÂÛ̳)
(Nobelprize.org)
(eMedicine)
(³ÉÈËÂÛ̳)
Back to top of page
In 2003 the supermarket Tesco told ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News that students in university towns were buying up 'brain foods' such as green vegetables and fish in a bid to sail through their exams.
Are the students on to something?
On its website, the National Health Service says that "chemicals in the brain can be influenced by what we eat, which can lead to changes in the way we think, feel and behave". The NHS says alcohol, caffeine, sugar, chocolate, cakes, biscuits, cheese and bread cause low moods.
The NHS recommends that we always have breakfast. When eating, try to choose foods that are digested slowly such as porridge, wholegrain rye bread, pasta, beans, lentils, noodles and basmati rice. These foods have a low glycaemic index (GI), which means they keep blood sugar levels more stable. Rapid changes in blood sugar level can cause lapses in concentration.
The NHS also recommends making oily fish such as mackerel, salmon and sardines part of our diets because it contains essential fatty acids (omega 3 oils) which improve mood and brain function.
The link below will take you to the full NHS recommendations.
Related links:
Eating to succeed (³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News)
(NHS direct)
(³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Get Smarter in a Week)
(³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Science & Nature)
Back to top of page
Child or infantile amnesia refers to the general inability of people to remember specific events from the early years of their lives, typically from before the first three and sometimes four years of life. In studies, the average age of the earliest memory reported is about three-and-a-half years old. Women tend to have better memories for this than men and, on average, could go back further than men. In general, when people respond to surveys, there are far fewer memories before the age of eight than for other periods.
There a number of ideas why child amnesia happens. The most controversial belonged to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud who believed childhood amnesia was a response to sexual repression. Another theory points to our lack of language skills before the age of three. It may be that our memories need to be stored conceptually and associated with the kinds of words and meanings that we don't really get to grips with until we're about three years old. Perhaps all of your childhood memories are still intact but in a form you can't access anymore.
Yet another view is that young children's brains simply don't have the tools to store memory properly. Babies are born with billions of brain cells but relatively few connections between them and so the areas of the brain responsible for processing memories are immature. In our brains, connections are everything and brain imaging studies on babies and toddlers suggest that between 8-24 months is when their brains are most active at growing more connections.
The text above is an excerpt from Radio 4's 'Memory experience'. Read the full article about childhood amnesia on the Radio 4 website.
Back to top of page
Scientific studies suggest there is a link between drug use and memory loss but more research is needed in this complicated, contentious area.
Everything we do changes our brain in some way. The very act of reading this sentence will (very) subtly alter your brain chemistry. However, drugs of abuse such as cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy set off a much more powerful cascade of changes that can have severe consequences for the user, consequences that may include memory loss.
The text above is an excerpt from Radio 4's 'Memory experience'. Read the full article about drugs and memory on the Radio 4 website.
Back to top of page
Lots of women say that their memories suffer during pregnancy, but is this anecdotal evidence backed up by research or is it a myth?
Keys are misplaced, phone numbers are forgotten, appointments are missed and strange items purchased without any memory of the event. Many women (and their partners) will recognise these experiences as symptoms of so-called 'baby brain'. During her first pregnancy broadcaster Mariella Frostrup found that "almost everything emptied out of my head for a few months and it was only just coming back when I fell pregnant again, so I was a bit of a casualty of two pregnancies in three years!". Wine writer Jilly Goolden remembers that, during her pregnancy, much of her time was spent standing in the supermarket paralysed by the "the inability to choose between a cabbage and a Brussel sprout."
So does research support the anecdotal evidence? Or is baby brain, officially at least, just a myth? Well, firstly, there isn't a vast amount of data on the subject. What there is comes down on both sides, with some research claiming that pregnant women perform just as well as non-pregnant women in memory tests whilst others claim the opposite.
The text above is an adapted excerpt from Radio 4's 'Memory experience'. Read the full article about pregnancy and memory on the Radio 4 website.
Back to top of page
Déjâ vu, (literally translated as 'already seen') is also known as paramnesia and describes the feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation before. It's a common feeling - around 70% of people report experiencing déjâ vu - but why does it happen?
Déjâ vu expert Chris Moulin thinks that when we recall the past, we create the experience of remembering but also create what he calls a 'recollective experience' - our sense of our self in the past. In a person with persistent déjâ vu this circuit may be either overactive or permanently switched on, creating memories where none exist. So when something new is processed, this feeling is coupled with a strong sense of remembering.
The text above is an adapted excerpt from Radio 4's 'Memory experience'. Read the full article about déjâ vu on the Radio 4 website.
Back to top of page
We used to call it shell-shock, now it's known as post-traumatic stress disorder, and it doesn't just affect soldiers at war. Anyone who has experienced or witnessed a very distressing event outside of normal everyday experience can suffer from this psychological condition.
Some of the best studied sufferers of PTSD are American veterans of the Vietnam war. In the mid 1990s, Dr. J Douglas Bremner, a psychiatrist at a Veterans Affairs (VA) Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, was one of the first to apply brain imaging to the study of PTSD. He focused on an area called the hippocampus which has at least two important functions: one is its role in the laying down of new memories; the other is its role in moderating emotional responses like fear.
What Bremner found was shocking. In every case, the hippocampus had shrunk or shrivelled as if the emotional trauma had literally eaten away a part of the brain that is crucial to memory and fear.
Bremner's work is one of the most cited papers in PTSD research and he has since shown similar results in victims of child abuse and other non-combat related traumas. What's clear from these studies is that prolonged exposure to severe stress - and the specific brain chemistry that goes along with it - can cause major structural damage to our brains.
The text above is an excerpt from Radio 4's 'Memory experience'. Read the full article about post-traumatic stress on the Radio 4 website.
Back to top of page
Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, making up 55% of cases, according the Alzheimer's Society. The society estimates that 750,000 people in the UK suffer from some form of dementia.
You can learn more about Alzheimer's by visiting the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Health website or the website.
Back to top of page
Memory isn't like a muscle, something specific you can exercise. It's a way of organising information in your brain. So to improve your memory, you need to change and re-organise the way you think and this will help to support how your memory works.
Go to the Radio 4 website for different memory tricks you can try, and to
see what others think of them.
Back to top of page
| 
