Today’s Popular Posts
- .
Popular Posts
- ,
Tag Archives: memory
Guanfacine: A possible drug to improve memory in old age
As you get old, you start to forget things. True. Not that you couldn’t forget things when you’re younger and distracted; but as you get older, perhaps you’re more easily distracted. Why would that be? There are many lines of research into the loss of memory capacity as we age. One such line is conducted [...]
Posted in News: Extending Lifespan Also tagged ADHD, aging, Arnsten, cAMP, clinical trial, ion channels, neurons, pre-frontal cortex, Tenex 2 Comments
Neuroscience: Memory tied to a specific protein complex
At times it must seem to neuroscientists that the enigma of memory reveals its secrets to them as if they were the proverbial blind men describing an elephant. “Ah yes, it has a hose, a very thick hose, so thick it’s almost like a tree trunk!” If only it were as easy to get the [...]
Posted in Impact: Neuroscience Also tagged axon, CaMKII, memory formation, neuron, neuroscience, NMDAR, protein, protein complex, synapse 1 Comment
Extending life with diet or insulin has trade-offs
Over the last decade or so, two of the most promising avenues of research in gerontology (the study of aging) and the search for means of extending human life have been on the effects of restricting diet and the activity of the hormone insulin. Numerous studies have shown that caloric restriction (not starvation, but a [...]
Posted in News: Extending Lifespan Also tagged aging, C. elegans, CREB, diet restriction, DNA, flatworm, insulin, lifespan, memory loss, mRNA, protein, RNA, sRNA Leave a comment
Memristors go into production
It’s difficult to evaluate what may be a fundamental advance in technology that happens to be mostly the product of a single company. The enthusiasm of one company doesn’t mean that the new technology – in this case the memristor (memory resistor) – will be accepted as fundamental to new products from other companies, in [...]
Posted in Impact: Computer Power Also tagged Chua, fab, HP, memristor, neuromorphic, phase change memory, RAM, synapses, titanium dioxide Leave a comment
New link between proteins and memory
Just as geneticists are finding that proteins play a complex and often crucial role in the expression of genes, the link between memory and proteins presents much new territory for neuroscience. That makes it exciting, for those in the field; and tantalizingly inconclusive. Work being done by Dr. Nahum Sonenberg at McGill University (Canada) has [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged 4E-BP2, deamidation, neuroscience, proteins, proteomics Leave a comment
The animal brain replays memories to map its environment
“The point of the cognitive map is flexibility. It gives animals the ability to plan novel paths within their environment,” said Redish [A. David Redish, University of Minnesota Medical School, USA]. “This replay process may be an animal’s way of learning how the world is interconnected, so it can plan new routes or paths.” [Source: [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged brain, cognition, cognitive map, hippocampus, neurons, replay Leave a comment
Brain memory is actively cleared
We forget, a lot. It’s always been assumed that we forget either because new information is coming in and ‘overwrites’ (replaces) older memories, or because memory just sort of degrades. There’s some kind of selection at work, of course, because some things we forget more readily than others. A new study by a team from [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged brain, molecular biology, neurons, neuroscience, protein, Rac Leave a comment
Prions bad. Prion shaping good – for memory
Understanding how memory in the brain works remains one of the most difficult and insight-resistant issues in neuroscience. Also, like most things about the brain (human brains, any brains), the more we look, the more complex it becomes. The research by a team from Kansas and New York (USA) on prion-like proteins is a good [...]
Posted in News: Proteomics Also tagged brain, CPEB, neuroscience, prions, proteins, virus Leave a comment
A coordinate system in the brain
In 2005 the Norwegians found them in rats. Now, in 2009, they were found in humans. ‘They’ – are location memory cells in the brain. They appear to be specialized neurons that work in some coordinated fashion. It’s something like having a coordinate system hard-wired into the brain, so as you move about the environment, [...]
Remembering faces, a specialized memory
It’s a familiar pattern in science, the more we learn about something, the more variations we see in the details. Take, for example, the human brain and its memory capacity. “Memory” used to be considered a unitary capability, that is, the ability to remember things was thought to be all part of the brain’s area [...]
Two (neuro)memory bits
Here are two bits of news, just announced via press release, about research into the function of memory (human or otherwise). What a wonderful neurological amalgam is a brain. It seems that whenever science tries to understand the brain with the technique of compartmentalization (part of the process of reductionism), as often as not further [...]
Posted in Impact: Neuroscience Also tagged hippocampus, long-term memory, memory erasure, neuroscience, reductionism, short-term memory Leave a comment
Learning over time better than cramming
We are just beginning to learn how memory works at the molecular and genetic level. Observations about how memory works are now acquiring fundamental explanations. For example: A new study from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro) of McGill University reveals that different patterns of training and learning lead to different types of [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged biochemistry, genes, microbiology, neuroscience Leave a comment
Give memory a rest
It’s been known for some time that there’s a correlation between sleep, rest, and memory. For example, it’s been shown that people who take naps while studying retain more information. A new study from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a team lead by Professor Yi Zhong has revealed a biochemical and genetic basis for this [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged biochemistry, genes, neuroscience, Noonan's disease Leave a comment
Getting your head around huge brain projects