We are saddened to hear of the death of Suzanne Corkin (MIT). Suzanne Corkin, whose painstaking work with a famous amnesiac known as H.M. helped clarify the biology of memory and its disorders, died on Tuesday in Danvers, Mass. She was 79. Sue was a phenomenal neuroscientist and communicator who carely deeply about her work, especially […]
What New Memory Research Can Tell Us About Second-Language Learning
Guest Post by Angela Grant, Pennsylvania State University Tell me if this sounds familiar: You just turned the light off, your head is on the pillow, your eyes are closed, and yet instead of drifting off to dreamland, you find yourself thinking about something that happened earlier in the day. Frustrating as rehashing those memories […]
Invading the Brain to Understand and Repair Cognition
CNS 2016 Blog (Press Release) April 5, 2016, New York – People are using brain-machine interfaces to restore motor function in ways never before possible – through limb prosthetics and exoskletons. But technologies to repair and improve cognition have been more elusive. That is rapidly changing with new tools – from fully implantable brain devices […]
Neuroscientists Working to Test Brain Training Claims
CNS 2016 Blog (Press Release) April 5, 2016, New York – The draw is huge: Play video games and get smarter. For the past decade, various groups have claimed that their cognitive training programs do everything from staving off neurodegenerative disease to enhancing education and improving daily functioning. Absent from many of these claims has […]
Understanding How We Trigger and Rehearse Memories
CNS 2016 Blog Today I met Daphna Shohamy. Will I remember who she is if I run into her later for dinner? If I see her, I probably won’t relive her morning talk but memories of CNS likely (hopefully!) will come to mind to help me remember who she is. This is how Shohamy likes […]
Inducing Amnesia of Daily Events by Trying to Forget Unwanted Memories
When we try to forget something unpleasant, whether a bad argument or a traumatic event, we may be unintentionally inducing amnesia of unrelated memories. According to a new study, this temporary state of amnesia mimics organic amnesia, disrupting the processes in the hippocampus that lead to long-term memory creation. The work, says senior author Michael […]
Stimulating Our Autobiographical Memories
We all wish at times that we had better memories of events in our lives – whether a childhood vacation, what we ate a few weeks ago, or maybe even where we were for the Oscars a few years ago. What if the answer were in a simple pulse of electricity at routine intervals, much […]
Battle of the Memories: Can an Old Memory Boost Our Ability to Remember New Things?
Our day-to-day lives can be thought of as a battle on the neural level. We have tons of stimuli fighting for our attention and of those, only a few will stick. I am often surprised by which things stick in my memory for the long-term, a particular shirt I wore or a line from a […]
Devil is in the Details: Specific Planning Leads to Unique Brain Activity
In our daily lives, we are all constantly setting goals, whether to go to the gym more or to save up for a vacation. In creating goals, some people more specifically outline the steps to get there than others. Those different approaches to planning engage different structures in the brain, according to a new study, […]
Patterns of Brain Activity Match Vividness of Memories
Pixar’s Inside Out portrays memories as glowing individual spheres that we replay in our minds like a movie on a projector screen. But in real life, neuroscientists have found that memories are not compartmentalized into perfect little bubbles; they are represented over a largely distributed set of brain regions. And the same brain regions at […]
