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…
"Consolidation" is a term that is bandied about a lot in recent memory research. Here's my take on what it means.
Becoming a memoryInitially, information is thought to be encoded as patterns of neural activity — cells "talking" to each other. Later, the information is coded in more…
"I'm terrible at remembering names"
"I'm great with names, but I'm hopeless at remembering what I've read."
"I always remember what people tell me about themselves, but I'm always forgetting birthdays and anniversaries."
There is no such thing as a poor…
Are you right-brained or left-brained?
One of the dumber questions around.
I think it’s safe to say that if you only had one hemisphere of your brain, you wouldn’t be functioning.
Of course, that’s not the point. But the real point is little more sensible. The whole idea…
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…
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…
It is clear that there are differences between the genders in terms of cognitive function; it is much less clear that there are differences in terms of cognitive abilities. Let me explain what I mean by that.
It's commonly understood that…
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-…
Autobiographical memory contains the information you have about yourself. It includes several domains:
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…