Trying to remember how you arranged last year’s Christmas ornaments on the tree? It turns out that blankly gazing at your empty tree could help. According to a new study, when we look even at an empty space, it cues our brain to remember the orientation of objects that previously occupied that space. Our eye […]
It’s not quantity but quality that matters when it comes to how much sleep strengthens our memories. A growing body of research is finding that specific stages of sleep shape particular types of learning in the brain. Whether for children napping or for older adults catching z’s at night, we all rely on sleep to […]
Even for those of us navigationally challenged, we may have vivid memories of exactly where we once saw a bad accident or a deer on the side of the road. These negative experiences boost our recall of places, according to new research. As a result, the very places we may want to forget are the […]
Most of us can recall a time when our mind blanked in an exam. Ironically, that vivid memory is of a time when we just couldn’t remember something. Part of the explanation for this contradiction is the stress hormone cortisol. While increased levels of cortisol boost the formation of memories, they can hinder their recall. […]
Changing how people direct their attention – and the associated brain patterns – could be key to some promising behavioral therapies to help everyone from smokers to patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A symposium Tuesday morning at CNS 2013 set out to integrate the current state of research on the neural networks involved […]
April 16, 2013 – San Francisco – Brain scans are increasingly able to reveal whether or not you believe you remember some person or event in your life. In a new study presented at a cognitive neuroscience meeting today, researchers used fMRI brain scans to detect whether a person recognized scenes from their own […]
Language plays a critical role in the development of the brain. As Patricia Kuhl demonstrated during Monday morning’s keynote session at CNS 2013, early childhood exposure to multiple languages not only enhances the ability to learn languages later in life, but also improves mental flexibility and creative thinking. But what can the way the brain […]
“…cognitive neuroscience research could help jurors and other participants in the legal system to better understand why it is that memory does not operate like a video recorder, and why it is sometimes prone to error and distortion.” Neuroscience is in the legal spotlight more than ever before, with the courts increasingly considering science-based evidence […]
As we age, our memories of autobiographical events often fade but some individuals are much better at remembering than others. A new study explores how our genetics result in some of these individual differences in memory retention – and finds that certain genes play an increasingly larger role in how much we forget as we […]
More and more research suggests that exercise is good for the aging brain. Researchers are also now working to understand how exercise affects the brains and behaviors of adolescents. A new study shows that while exercise does not improve teenagers’ performance on certain memory tasks, it does affect how their brains adapt to perform the […]
