How Memory Works

Humans have a long tradition of holding genes responsible for individual differences in behavior (of course, we called it "blood", then, or "family"). In the 20th century, a counter-belief arose: that it was all down to environment, to upbringing. In more recent decades, we have become…

Difficulty in remembering people’s names is one of the most common memory tasks that people wish to be better at. And the reason for this is not that their memory is poor, but because it is so embarrassing when their memory lets them down.

This isn’t just an issue at a personal level. It…

Working memory is a relatively recent term, a refinement of an older concept - that of short-term memory. Short-term memory was called thus to distinguish it from "long-term memory" - your memory store.

One important difference between the idea of short…

The mediotemporal lobe (MTL) is a concept rather than a defined brain structure. It includes the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the entorhinal and perirhinal cortices - all structures within the medial area of the temporal lobe.The temporal lobe is in general primarily concerned with sensory…

Does emotion help us remember? That's not an easy question to answer, which is unsurprising when you consider the complexities of emotion.

First of all, there are two, quite different, elements to this question. The first concerns the emotional content of the information you want to…

I have two sons. One of them was a colicky baby. Night after night my partner would carry him around the room while I tried to get a little sleep. One night, for his own amusement, my partner chose a particular CD to play. Magic! As the haunting notes of the hymns of…

You may have heard of “g”. It’s the closest we’ve come to that elusive attribute known as “intelligence”, but it is in fact a psychometric construct, that is, we surmise its presence from the way in which scores on various cognitive tests positively correlate.

In other words, we don’t…

"Consolidation" is a term that is bandied about a lot in recent memory research. Here's my take on what it means.

Initially, information is thought to be encoded as patterns of neural activity — cells "talking" to each other. Later, the information is coded in more…

Autobiographical memory contains the information you have about yourself. It includes several domains:

• self-description (the source of a large part of your sense of identity), containing information such as:
  • whether or not you like ice-cream
  • what your…

Neurogenesis — the creation of new brain cells — occurs of course at a great rate in the very young. For a long time, it was not thought to occur in adult brains — once you were grown, it was thought, all you could do was watch your brain cells die!

Adult…