News stories about memory
Recently a number of interesting stories about memory have appeared, and this week I’ve finally got enough time to get to some of them.
The first story is actually about forgetting, or the ways in which memories are lost or corrupted. It’s easy to imagine memories being eroded by time and fading away, but it turns out that what’s more likely to happen is that they are scrambled by interference from other, sometimes similar, information. The inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) is part of the brain that’s active when test subjects have to work against interference to recall information, and a recent study investigated the role of the IFG in this process: was it simply contributing CPU cycles, so to speak, or was it actively doing something to combat the interference? The study used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to briefly switch off activity in the IFG by disrupting the neurons in that part of the brain. Without the IFG’s contribution, people’s performance on a memory task involving interference dropped significantly, indicating that the IFG has a specific role to play in sorting through possibly confusing information. Thanks to Mark for telling me about this story, which you can read about in this press release from Science Daily.
Last year I read a book by Tyler Volk about how death is inextricably woven into the fabric of life. So I was intrigued particularly by the comments at the end of this press release about a protein that plays a dual role, active in both memory formation and apoptosis, or cell death. Caspase-3 appears to play a key role in the biochemistry of memory formation, as well as in the process by which cells die. The closing quote (from David Clayton, a professor of cell and structural biology at Illinois) is about how growth and memory can be conceived of as a “a kind of remodeling” and how “You can’t have growth without death.”
A flashbulb memory is a particularly vivid and convincing memory of a highly significant event (iconic examples are the Kennedy assassination or the Challenger disaster). Researchers at New York University have examined the brain activity of 24 people who were in Manhattan on 9/11, watching as they recalled the events of that day. Those closer to downtown had more vivid memories and showed more activity in the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotions. This suggests that direct personal involvement is important in the formation of flashbulb memories. This press release briefly describes the study.
Finally, here’s an older story about virtual experiences and memories. Information that is supplied via an interactive electronic interface instead of static text and images is more vividly remembered, but it’s also more likely to be misremembered. In a study by a marketing professor at the University of Washington Business School, volunteers who used an interactive guide to a camera’s features were more likely to incorrectly recall information about the camera, believing it had features or capabilities that it didn’t have. Evidently the more vivid mental images generated by the interactive interface caused more confusion about what was real and what was just imagined. You can read about it in this press release.
