Tuesday, 1 June 2021
Quiz about memory
Which of the following is your memory most like: 1) a huge library where all your memories are shelved? 2) a computer hard drive where data are stored in a binary code of 0s and 1s? 3) a dresser with lots of drawers full of memories? 4) the game of telephone, where one person whispers a message to the next until it ends up being distorted? (more…)
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Monday, 7 November 2016
Norman Doidge and cerebral plasticity
This week, I want to recommend a Brain Science Podcast featuring Dr. Norman Doidge, first posted online in February 2015. This podcast was in a sense a sequel to one devoted to Doidge’s book The Brain That Changes Itself (links to both podcasts are provided below). Both of these programs discuss a fundamental characteristic of the human brain: its great plasticity, even in adults—in other words, the fact that the brain’s neural circuits reorganize themselves constantly throughout our lifetimes. (more…)
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Monday, 20 October 2014
Reading Novels Increases Connectivity of Areas in the Brain
Immersing yourself in reading a good novel is an excellent way to take a break from the stresses of daily life. By seeing things from the protagonists’ point of view while you are reading those few hundred pages, not only do you feel as if you have access to another world, but you may also continue to have this feeling for some time, or even for your entire life, if the book has really made an impression on you.
The neurobiological bases of this phenomenon would appear to have been discovered in a study that Gregory S. Berns and his colleagues published in the journal Brain Connectivity in Fall 2013. The subjects in this study were 21 young adults. In the first phase of the study, the subjects received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans for five consecutive days. The researchers then used these scans to develop a general diagram of the connectivity of each subject’s brain. (more…)
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Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Links on How Memory Works (continued)
Research on human memory is such an important aspect of cognitive neuroscience today that a tremendous number of articles about memory research can be found on the Internet. So this week, I am continuing last week’s list of new links to articles about various aspects of how memory works—one of the sub-topics covered under the topic Memory and the Brain in The Brain from Top to Bottom. For each link, I provide a brief description of the article in question.
(For more background on how I compile these lists, see my earlier post on Links About Brain Anatomy.) (more…)
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