Coming Soon: Photographic Memory in a Pill?

From Denny: This sounds too good to be true! The only problem I ask is this: So, do you have a pill for extra capacity brain storage? :) Because you know people would go wild with this, testing it by reading whole Oxford Dictionaries, encyclopedias, going to the Library of Congress and reading through the entire library - the largest in the world - just to find out how much they could retain.

From the folks over at Popular Science. Here's an excerpt:

"Scientists isolate a protein that significantly increases visual recall

"Wish you had a photographic memory? Well, Encyclopedia Brown, drugs may amp your brain up to that point soon. A group of Spanish scientists claim to have singled out a protein that can extend the life of visual memory significantly. When the production of the protein was boosted in mice, the rodents' visual memory retention increased, from about an hour to almost 2 months.

"Unlike the long-term memory creation that was imaged recently, this memory extension only applies to memories made through the poorly-understood visual cortex of the brain."

For the rest of this brief article just click on the title link to get you there! Thanks for visiting!

Video: Memory Man

From Denny: Memory loss is still a mystery to the medical world. Gianni Golfera is known as the Memory Man for his unusual and accurate memory. He claims to remember events as far back as his infancy. He has also studied memory techniques for years and teaches them to others in seminars. Scientists still don't know how much genes play in memory ability.

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Brain: In One Ear and Out the Other

From Denny: It turns out our brain's short-term memory can usually only handle between 5 to 9 data chunks at a time before clearing the cache. It doesn't help any that our brains love pattern and predictable patterns at that. We like to organize new information and our perception into patterns. That's why music is so easy to remember.

Take into account that a really good joke relies upon subverting the predictable pattern recognition we expect. Jokes love shouting the unexpected to our brains, like a magician utilizing misdirection, starting on one path and then suddenly jerking us on to another path.

"Robert Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, 'What makes a joke successful are the same properties that can make it difficult to remember.'"

We can remember the cliched jokes like the mother-in-law ones. Why? They have predictable patterns!

An additional reason we can't easily recall that stellar joke:

"Daniel L. Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard, there is a big difference between verbatim recall of all the details of an event and gist recall of its general meaning. Jokes tend to live or die because of the details of nuance, precision and timing."

*** THE ARTICLE CLIP ***

"By all accounts, my grandfather Nathan had the comic ambitions of a Jack Benny but the comic gifts of a John Kerry. Undeterred, he always kept a few blank index cards in his pocket, so that if he happened to hear a good joke, he’d have someplace to write it down.

Like many people, I can never remember a joke. I hear or read something hilarious, I laugh loudly enough to embarrass everybody else in the library, and then I instantly forget everything about it — everything except the fact, always popular around the dinner table, that 'I heard a great joke today, but now I can’t remember what it was.'

For researchers who study memory, the ease with which people forget jokes is one of those quirks, those little skids on the neuronal banana peel, that end up revealing a surprising amount about the underlying architecture of memory.

And there are plenty of other similarly illuminating examples of memory’s whimsy and bad taste — like why you may forget your spouse’s birthday but will go to your deathbed remembering every word of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song. And why you must chop a string of data like a phone number into manageable and predictable chunks to remember it and will fall to pieces if you are in Britain and hear a number read out as “double-four, double-three.” And why your efforts to fill in a sudden memory lapse by asking your companions, “Hey, what was the name of that actor who starred in the movie we saw on Friday?” may well fail, because (what useless friends!) now they’ve all forgotten, too.

Welcome to the human brain, your three-pound throne of wisdom with the whoopee cushion on the seat."

By Natalie Angier @ New York Times

How distractible are you? The answer may lie in your working memory capacity

"Some people, however, seem to be able to be incredibly productive despite a huge number of distractions -- Twitter status updates, email, crying babies, you name it. Indeed, some people can't work well if things are too quiet. For them, uninterrupted silence is more distracting than cacophony.

But whatever their working environment, it's clear that some people are simply better at focusing on the task at hand. What makes people's minds more or less likely to wander? Several studies point to working memory capacity as the key."

By Dave Munger

From Denny: Bummer! This sounds like you're basically screwed if you are unable to increase your working memory capacity. This might explain the issue with ADD disorder and the immature brain.

In the end, a lot of factors go into our ability to focus for long periods of time and do so in a riveted fashion until the project is completed - like do you eat right in order to feed your brain.

This study makes me wonder that when the mind wanders it is really resting itself and resetting its working memory capacity, sort of like flushing the cache of the useless and resetting to a cleaner environment. Just my speculative thoughts...

Photo by d3 Dan @ flickr

How to Become a Human Calendar

"Mentally finding out the day of the week for any date is a skill you can easily learn. You don’t need to be an autistic genius – all it takes is basic memorization effort and some trivial math.

When I first learned this technique many years ago, I did it just for fun. With time, I learned to enjoy the convenience of not needing a calendar anymore. It’s far more useful than I first thought, and with just a little practice, you’ll be able to find out the days of the week much faster than when reaching for a calendar."

By Luciano Passuello

From Denny: How cool is this??! Explained simply and quickly.

Improve Your Memory by Speaking Your Mind's Language

"By learning the language your mind uses, you’ll be able to tap into your mind’s full potential and develop a remarkable memory. It’s easier than you think - and you’ll actually have fun doing it.

Your Mind Thinks in Pictures

Along its evolution, the brain has become amazingly effective in dealing with sensory data. It is by correctly interpreting the five senses that the mind understands the environment and takes decisions.

Among the human senses, sight has become the most sophisticated and developed of all. For that reason, our brains have become extremely effective in storing and processing images; especially of concrete, real-world objects. Trying to memorize abstract symbols, such as words printed on a page, is very unnatural and inefficient. Words are useful units of communication created by us, but they’re not how our brains are best used to process information."

By Luciano Passuelloon

I just love this guy's blog and so will you!