Home
Weiye Loh's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
“Time and memory are intertwined,” he says, speaking to iMaverick from his lab in Houston, Texas. “When you look back on an event, how long you think it lasted depends on how many new memories you think you have. How much new memory your brain wrote down. So when you had a really exciting weekend full of novelty, you look back on it and you think: ‘Wow. It feels like forever since it was Friday.’ When you have a boring standard weekend it seems to have disappeared,” he says.
“I think this is also why time speeds up when you are older, because when you are older you have figured out the rules of the world and your brain isn’t writing much down in contrast to when you are a child; everything is new and your summer is full of new memory, so it seems to last longer,” says Eagleman.
-
“In my laboratory what we have discovered over the last decade is that time isn’t what you think it,” says the head of the neuroscience research laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine. “We can make you think that a duration lasted or shorter than it actually did; we can make you think that something came before something else; we can make you think that two things are simultaneous when they are actually not; and so on. What this indicates to us is that time is not a river that is passively flowing past and we are tracking it, but that the brain is actively constructing its sense of time.”
-
people’s perception of time is flawed. “We all accept the reality presented to us, but the truth is that we are like fish in water trying to describe water. We have never seen anything other than the water so it is difficult to even know what it is. But if a bubble comes up in the water one day, that’s when you say: ‘Wow. Something strange is going on here.’ And that is what things like perceptual illusions are to us. It is like a bubble in the water when we say things aren’t exactly what we thought they were and it allows us to understand how the brain is constructing this illusion around us.”
- 5 more annotation(s)...
Thanks to search engines, most simple facts don’t need to be remembered. They can be accessed with a few keystrokes, plucked from ubiquitous server-stored external memory — and that may be changing how our own memories are maintained.
A study of 46 college students found lower rates of recall on newly-learned facts when students thought those facts were saved on a computer for later recovery.
If you think a fact is conveniently available online, then, you may be less apt to learn it.
-
study co-author and Columbia University psychologist Elizabeth Sparrow said it’s just another form of so-called transactive memory, exhibited by people working in groups in which facts and expertise are distributed.
-
A direct comparison of transactive learning by individuals in groups and on computers has not been performed. It would be interesting to see how they stack up, said Sparrow.
It would also be interesting to further compare how transactive and internal memory function. They could affect other thought processes: For example, someone relying on internalized memory may review and synthesize other memories during recall.
One small but intriguing effect in the new study involved students who were less able to identify subtly manipulated facts, such as a changed name or date, when drawing on memories they thought were saved online.
Scientists have designed a brain implant that restored lost memory function and strengthened recall of new information in laboratory rats — a crucial first step in the development of so-called neuroprosthetic devices to repair deficits from dementia, stroke and other brain injuries in humans.
-
the implant demonstrates for the first time that a cognitive function can be improved with a device that mimics the firing patterns of neurons. In recent years neuroscientists have developed implants that allow paralyzed people to move prosthetic limbs or a computer cursor, using their thoughts to activate the machines. In the new work, being published Friday, researchers at Wake Forest University and the University of Southern California used some of the same techniques to read neural activity. But they translated those signals internally, to improve brain function rather than to activate outside appendages.
A new study, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, helps explain both the success of this marketing strategy and my flawed nostalgia for Coke. It turns out that vivid commercials are incredibly good at tricking the hippocampus (a center of long-term memory in the brain) into believing that the scene we just watched on television actually happened. And it happened to us.
-
The experiment went like this: 100 undergraduates were introduced to a new popcorn product called “Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn.” (No such product exists, but that’s the point.) Then, the students were randomly assigned to various advertisement conditions. Some subjects viewed low-imagery text ads, which described the delicious taste of this new snack food. Others watched a high-imagery commercial, in which they watched all sorts of happy people enjoying this popcorn in their living room. After viewing the ads, the students were then assigned to one of two rooms. In one room, they were given an unrelated survey. In the other room, however, they were given a sample of this fictional new popcorn to taste. (A different Orville Redenbacher popcorn was actually used.)
One week later, all the subjects were quizzed about their memory of the product. Here’s where things get disturbing: While students who saw the low-imagery ad were extremely unlikely to report having tried the popcorn, those who watched the slick commercial were just as likely to have said they tried the popcorn as those who actually did. Furthermore, their ratings of the product were as favorable as those who sampled the salty, buttery treat. Most troubling, perhaps, is that these subjects were extremely confident in these made-up memories. The delusion felt true. They didn’t like the popcorn because they’d seen a good ad. They liked the popcorn because it was delicious.
-
“false experience effect,”
- 3 more annotation(s)...
We could make cognition-related fear-mongering shameful and rare, make debates about end-of-life care less searing, improve treatment protocols, reaffirm our collective compact with older people, ease our relationships with people of any age who are cognitively impaired, and enable adults to look forward to getting older with hope instead of despair.
The art of memory is credited to the ancient Greek poet Simonides, who was able to perfectly recall the scene in a banquet hall moments before the roof collapsed, simply by reviewing it in his mind’s eye. The “method of loci” assigns distinctive images to anything one wants to remember, placing the images in familiar rooms or buildings. Recalling, then, becomes a matter of traveling through those locations, or “memory palaces,” and noting the images assembled there. This seeming sleight of hand — memorize X in order to remember Y — takes advantage of a simple fact of human cognition: we naturally remember visual images. Take a moment to imagine your own living room; a detailed description of everything in sight is effortless.
Translating your shopping list into something memorable involves choosing good images and good loci — and then concentrating on them. The less banal, the better. Quotidian scenes are forgettable. What snags the cells of our brains are disgusting, bizarre and novel images.
-
The art of memory is credited to the ancient Greek poet Simonides, who was able to perfectly recall the scene in a banquet hall moments before the roof collapsed, simply by reviewing it in his mind’s eye. The “method of loci” assigns distinctive images to anything one wants to remember, placing the images in familiar rooms or buildings. Recalling, then, becomes a matter of traveling through those locations, or “memory palaces,” and noting the images assembled there. This seeming sleight of hand — memorize X in order to remember Y — takes advantage of a simple fact of human cognition: we naturally remember visual images. Take a moment to imagine your own living room; a detailed description of everything in sight is effortless.
Translating your shopping list into something memorable involves choosing good images and good loci — and then concentrating on them. The less banal, the better. Quotidian scenes are forgettable. What snags the cells of our brains are disgusting, bizarre and novel images.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in Memory
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo