Immune cells are like the Hatfields and McCoys of our bodies--once wronged, they never, ever forget. This is how we gain immunity, and it’s why vaccines work: Immune cells develop a memory of an invading pathogen, and they build an alert system to find and fight it should it ever return. But a new study by Stanford researchers adds a new wrinkle to this long-held immune theory. It turns out immune cells can develop this memory-like state even for pathogens they’ve never met. This may come from exposure to harmless microbes -- or the memories may actually be borrowed from other, more experienced cells.
My BBC Future column from a few days ago. The original is here. I’m donating the fee from this article to Wikipedia. Read the column and it should be obvious why. Perhaps you should too: dona...
Sakis Koukouvis's insight:
Our minds are made up just as much by the people and tools around us as they are by the brain cells inside our skull.
John Smart, co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation—an organization dedicated to the study of maintaining brain function after our biological death—argues that the "redundant, resilient and distributed" nature of long-term memory makes it possible to preserve significant portions of our identity after death.
Your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working – and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete.
Neuroscientist Sara Lazar's amazing brain scans show meditation can actually change the size of key regions of our brain, improving our memory and making us more empathetic, compassionate, and resilient under stress.
An ecosystem is a good model because it treats memory as something that lives in the mind. For those interested in learning how advertising works to create branded memories, it sets a new kind of agenda for asking research questions, particularly for researchers in the new area of marketing neuroscience.
Memories in our brains are maintained by connections between neurons called "synapses". But how do these synapses stay strong and keep memories alive for decades? Neuroscientists at the Stowers Ins...
Both the placebo and the memory task reduced pain substantially—but independently of one another. What’s more, the placebo did not affect performance on the cognitive task. Together, these findings indicate that placebos do not require executive attention and working memory to be effective. In other words, it’s highly unlikely that expectations bring relief by altering cognitive function.
"The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves."
A study by Johns Hopkins researchers has shown that a widely accepted model of long-term memory formation -- that it hinges on a single enzyme in the brain -- is flawed. The new study, published in the Jan. 2 issue of Nature, found that mice lacking the enzyme that purportedly builds memory were in fact still able to form long-term memories as well as normal mice could.
Many children spontaneously report memories of 'past lives'. For believers, this is evidence for reincarnation; for others, it's a psychological oddity. But what happens when they grow up?
The sought-after equanimity of "living in the moment" may be impossible, according to neuroscientists who've pinpointed a brain area responsible for using past decisions and outcomes to guide future behavior.
Imagination is the ability to form mental images, phonological passages, analogies, or narratives of something that is not perceived through our senses. Imagination is a manifestation of our memory and enables us to scrutinize our past and construct hypothetical future scenarios that do not yet, but could exist. Imagination also gives us the ability to see things from other points of view and empathize with others.
Placebos reduce pain by creating an expectation of relief. Distraction -- say, doing a puzzle -- relieves it by keeping the brain busy. But do they use the same brain processes? Neuromaging suggests they do.
Thinking of memory as a network is obvious for two reasons. First, it’s the image we all hold in our minds of the brain as a ball of neurons networked together. Second, the Internet has become a popular model for the brain, particularly as social networking has begun to transform the business of marketing.
Because our views, preferences, ideas and desires inevitably change over time, the existence-across-time that I call "myself" isn't a unitary, eternal and changeless individual. It's more like a chain of people, each one very similar to the ones before and after him, somewhat more different from the ones that are further away, although there are probably some major commonalities that last over a significant portion of my life.
Cognitive Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, a pioneer in the study of hemispheric (left vs. right brain) specialization describes "the Interpreter" - a left hemisphere function that organizes our memories into plausible stories. Less romantic, perhaps, than Gone With the Wind, the Interpreter may help to explain our species' profound relationship with storytelling.
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