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What Scientists Now Know About Repairing Memories

I find this article very interesting, especially in the context of libraries and museums as memory institutions.

What Scientists Now Know About Repairing Memories

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2013/06/what-scientists-now-know-about-repairing-memories/?utm_source=WhatCountsEmail&utm_medium=Above%20the%20Fold&utm_campaign=Above%20the%20Fold

You must remember this

Here are more conclusions scientists have made about memories in the past few months:

  • Side effects may include memories of bad breakups: According to a study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, people who take the sleep drug Ambien are more likely to remember bad memories. The human brain is built to remember negative memories more clearly than pleasant ones, says University of California Riverside researcher Sara Mednick, and her study found that Ambien seemed to ratchet up this tendency.
  • My memory told me about people like you: Scientists at Harvard have found more evidence that memories of the past play a big part in how we predict how other people will behave in the future. The study reinforces the belief that memory is closely linked with imagination and is a tool used by the brain to weave past experience into thoughts about the future. Which could explain why people with memory problems, such as amnesiacs or the elderly, often struggle to envision the future.
  • Unfortunately, they also started leaving the toilet seat up: While one recent study supported the belief that women suffer some memory loss during menopause, another one, presented earlier this week at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco, determined that postmenopausal women had sharper memories after they had a testosterone gel rubbed into their skin. This is potentially big news since there currently is no effective treatment to prevent memory loss in women, who are at higher risk of dementia than men.
  • They even remember the blank look on men’s faces: Two more studies found that women overall have better memories than men. The first study, from McMaster University in Canada, found that women tend to focus on the eyes, nose and mouth of someone they just met and, as a result, are better at remembering faces than men. The second study, done at Cornell, concluded that women are also better at remembering past events than men. The key, according to the researchers, is that women focus more on relationships and social interactions when recording an event in their mind and that enables them to retrieve more details about it later.
  • Don’t forget to brush your teeth: It turns out that the fewer teeth you have, the greater your chances of losing memory. So says a new study published in the European Journal of Oral Sciences, which offered a few possible explanations for the tooth loss/brain decline connection. One is that reduced sensory input from our teeth results in fewer signals to our brain. Another is that chewing increases blood flow to the brain, and if you can’t chew, you can’t get the flow going.

Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2013/06/what-scientists-now-know-about-repairing-memories/#ixzz2Ywzgsp3m
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Maybe libraries’ neediest customers are the toothless.;-)

Stephen

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Posted on: July 17, 2013, 7:10 am Category: Uncategorized

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