Recovering memories that never left

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 2 days (www.sciencenews.org)

There may be no single, simple explanation for reports of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Witness the first evidence that people who report such recall display either of two cognitive profiles, one signaling a susceptibility to retrieving false memories and the other a tendency to have forgotten earlier recollections of actual abuse

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Memories may be stored on your DNA

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 5 days (www.newscientist.com)

REMEMBER your first kiss? Experiments in mice suggest that patterns of chemical "caps" on our DNA may be responsible for preserving such memories.

To remember a particular event, a specific sequence of neurons must fire at just the right time. For this to happen, neurons must be connected in a certain way by chemical junctions called synapses. But how they last over decades, given that proteins in the brain, including those that form synapses, are destroyed and replaced constantly, is a mystery

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Making Memories Last

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 4 weeks (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

When it comes to the neurobiology of memory, the hippocampus typically gets most of the credit. But although this brain region is crucial for recording new memories, like the name of someone you just met at a bar, people with a damaged hippocampus can still recall memories from days of old. Many neuroscientists believe this is because lasting memories get shifted to the cerebral cortex for permanent storage. Little is known about how this might happen, but a study in today's issue of Science provides some clues.

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To Sleep, Perchance to Forget

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 1 week (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

A new study has found that older rats seem to replay previous events less and, as a result, have more trouble remembering than younger animals.

Could those memory problems be due to a decline in the brain's replay during sleep? How can these results be extrapolated to humans?

1 comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: sleep research sleep memories memory sleep patterns human brain activity brains rats

Sleep loss produces false memories

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 3 weeks (www.nature.com)

Sleepless nights can increase your chances of forming false memories, according to researchers in Germany and Switzerland. But, as for so many aspects of life, it seems that coffee can save the day.

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Aging makes the imagination wither

Brain Yields Clues to False Memories

biller submitted, created time 1 year 1 month (www.medicinenet.com)

The areas of the brain where memory is processed may determine how a person can be absolutely certain of a past event that never occurred, otherwise known as a "false memory".

1 comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: frontal parietal network (FPN) repressed memories memories memory brain activity

Sleep enforces the temporal sequence in memory

julie submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.biologynews.net)

"We have usually quite strong memories of past events like an exciting holiday or a jolly birthday party. However it is not clear how the brain keeps track of the temporal sequence in such memories: did Paul spill a glass of wine before or after Mary left the party? "

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Locking childhood memories into the brain

diggman submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (arstechnica.com)

The topic under review is the issue of how early (even preconscious) childhood memories can be maintained so that they have significant influences on adult behavior. The authors are approaching this topic from a human perspective, noting that abuse and neglect can influence a wide variety of cognitive and emotional behaviors in humans that last well into adulthood

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I misremember it well: Why older adults are unreliable eyewitnesses

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 year 10 months (oscar.virginia.edu)

Here's an article from the University of Virginia, although it was also published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. It says that wrongful eyewitness testimony, which can be unreliable regardless of the age of the witness, is probably the biggest single cause of wrongful convictions in the United States

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Psychologists and literary historians cooperate on conclusion: There's probably no such thing as repressed memories.

Hecate submitted, created time 1 year 11 months (www.nytimes.com)

Here is a good example of how history and medicine can cross over: It seems that there are no historical references to repressed memories before 1800, when novelists began using it as a plot device, not in fiction and not in nonfiction. Scientists and literary scholars collaborated on this project, which was written up in [i]Psychological Medicine[/i].

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