Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts

Young Blood – Put Your Order Into The Blood Bank For Your Memory’s Sake


Young blood may be to way to go for bright outlook on life. Of course, we aren’t full up of that young vital fluid pulsing through our veins after we see our 30-th birthday come and go. Looking out, things may look the same, but looking in, well let’s not pull any punches, we look progressively challenged in jeunesse doreé stakes.

After accidents in which we leak, or if we want to get a boost in a cycle race, blood transfusions are a good thing. The Guardian has a news item on the work reported by Villeda et al at the at the New Orleans meet of the Society of Neuroscience (1). They gave old mice transfusions of blood from young mice and that young blood perked the old fellas up no end.

Apparently, the scuttlebutt is that Kim Jong-Il was into young blood transfusions to aid his youthful outlook. The young blood he chose, was said to be from healthy young virgins (female I assume), but we don’t have confirmed data on this. So back to mice and science.

The old mice got their shots of young blood and their memories improved and the ageing process had slowed. There were 20% more neuron connections and that’s important for a mouse if you’re looking for your cheese. It’s even more important if it’s you or me and we’re looking for our car keys.

In addition to improved connectivity, they found an increase in stem cells and that’s really important for keeping your brain plump and healthy.

The question on all your lips is of course was it the young cells in the blood or proteins in the plasma. Well, after plasma injections our old-fella mice were repeatedly tossed into a swimming pool with islands and they learned to find the islands and remembered where they were a lot better than un-transfused fellows.

Clearly, there is something in the plasma that makes them more difficult to drown. Definitely we old fogies need to sign up with groups of teens to get transfusions of their plasma just in case we fall into a swimming pool with islands. BUT it may also help us to remember where on earth we put those car keys.

  1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/oct/17/young-blood-reverse-effects-ageing

Forgetting To Remember Or Remembering To Forget?


Whether it is revising for a test or just trying to think where you left your keys, remembering things is something we put a lot effort into and not as successfully as we would like. Hence we devise little word games or mnemonics as an aid. But what about trying to forget?   Please  read more@ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com/

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Remember The Facts


Recalling facts or events with ease is a skill that is generally admired and rewarded. The reward may be small, such as winning a beer in a bet in our local hostelry or as large as passing your examinations to become a Harvard MBA with its promise of wealth beyond the dreams of your erstwhile school pals.

How your brain actually stores the mountain of trivia that we stuff into it and the details of the recall process, which usually digs out bits and puts them back together differently each time, makes for an interesting life’s work. But is there something we can do to fix the information most effectively? Was our parents advice to stop studying and get a good nights sleep before that crucial test good advice?

Yes it was, but so was the handful of cash promised if you got the answers right. Apparently, small rewards are good enough to help us remember. Of course we have to know up front what the deal is. The optimal test strategy is now clear after Tucker and his Harvard U team’s new paper (1).

The equal opportunity test team were 152 Harvard students, who at twenty years old are steeped in the learning – testing cycle. The test was recalling objects associated with a face from photographs of face/object pairs. The reward was a flat fee of $30 for half the lab rats and the other half had a fee of $10 plus a $1 bonus for each correct answer up to a maximal earning capacity of $40. The procedure was to learn either in the morning or in the evening. The tests were then conducted either 12 hours afterward or twenty four hours afterwards.

So, what is the optimal way to study for that test? The clear winners were the students who studied at 9 p.m. and had a good nights sleep for a 9 a.m. test, and these were also on the cash bonus track. Clearly, hungry Harvard undergrads will work for peanuts.

Learning in the morning and being tested in the following evening wasn’t very good. I guess too much junk, Twitter feeds and Facebook work was crowding out the important stuff.

Apparently the sleep period helps to fix the information. Testing after 24 hours was bad, but again sleep straight after learning for a test the following evening was still better than having a day to junk up your learned stuff.  So your mom was right after all – turn off your smartphone,  get your head down and remember the bonus.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021737

Our Communal Memory


The old fogies amongst us, that is, anyone over 30, will recall examinations that required that we remember all sorts of stuff. Such things as open book exams were dangled on the horizons of our desires. Those classmates who did well and remembered all that stuff were deemed to be clever. Now things are very different. There is no need to store all that general information and tie up those synapses with trivia. Google, Wikipedia and their lesser brethren are a few thumb taps away.

Now that we no longer have to try and remember things, we have to get organized with our bookmarks and favorites. Re-searching the whole of the collective memory would take too long if we had to do it afresh every time. Instant gratification is already taking too long. So now we have to remember where to find things in our transactive memory.

Sparrow et al have been testing students (not old fogies) on their interaction with computers and if they try and remember what they were doing (1). There were a series of tests, but the interesting one was where they had to type in lots of trivia statements that they were given and the computer told them that it had stored it in a file or had erased it. Half of the students in each of these groups were also asked to remember the statements.

Well, no one did very well remembering many of the statements. The ones that were told that the data would be erased did better, though. They also did better when shown the statements, many of which had been slightly altered. Being told to remember did nothing for them. It was the knowledge that it would be erased so they wouldn’t be able to look it up that worked. When students were told that the information would be stored in one of a series of folders, they were much better at remembering the name of the folder than the details of the information.

The tendency, then, is to remember where you put things rather than exactly what they are, even when the trivia was a memorable as “The international dialing code for Antarctica is 672,” “Bluebirds can’t see the color blue” or “A quarter has 119 grooves around the edge.” Any of these gems must be worth a beer in any bar room discussion.

The downside is, of course that knowing a fact is not the same as understanding it. We still have to learn to ask why or else we’ll stagnate. So it will be interesting to see if we become smarter now that we  have our huge transactive communal memory in addition to our personal one, thus freeing up our little grey cells for creativity and leaving parroting to the parrots.

  1. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/07/13/science.1207745

Learning The Hard Way


Elephants are credited with having an extremely good long-term memory capability. A good memory is a survival asset and our locations, with refuges and food sources, are critical learning requirements for a large number of species. How quickly we learn, though, is another problem.
                                                                     Great Pond Snail                                                        
Wikipedia

Apparently when it comes to memory and wrote learning, the great pond snail is a good test subject. Perhaps not up to the standard to make it a regular circus performer, but good enough to keep the attention of an academic audience.

The latest challenge to these mollusks was thrown down by Dalesman et al (1). They rooted around in a couple of small drainage ditches and a couple of large canals to acquire four populations of these performers. They were dumped into pond water and given half an hour to memorize the details of their new surroundings. 24 hours later, they “sat” their examinations.

Bad news was to follow. Only a dismal 25% pass rate was achieved. The populations were given a year to get their acts together and then went through the same procedure. Alas, with the same result.

Now it was time for a serious intervention. Tench and crayfish like great pond snails, for lunch that is. When our mollusk students got a whiff of either, their long-term memory improved to a remarkable level.

Clearly, in the carrot and stick approach used here, the carrot was not a very worthwhile carrot. On the other hand the stick was certainly big enough. Will we see an equivalent introduced for human students in the Universities of Calgary and Plymouth who collaborated on this study?
  
  1. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.05.005