Families and friends share memories all the time; “You’ll never guess…”, “How was your day?”, and “Do you remember when…” are rich daily fodder. Sharing memories is not only a good way to debrief and reminisce…
Six weeks ago I arrived back in London after my first trip to Australia. It felt considerably colder than the 34 degrees we’d left behind in Sydney, but the skies were clear and blue. Or were they? My…
Police often rely on witnesses to finger the right guy, but eyewitnesses are far from perfect.
Lineup image via www.shutterstock.com.
Twenty eyewitnesses testified before the grand jury investigating the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. None of these accounts is fully consistent with any other. Moreover, eyewitnesses…
The podcast Serial investigates the murder of 18-year-old American student Hae Min Lee 15 years ago.
LukaTDB/Shutterstock
Can you recall what you were doing last Wednesday between 2.15pm and 2.36pm? Where were you? What did you see? Who did you talk to? How well do you remember those 21 minutes? Now try to recall Wednesday…
Research into gene regulation can treat illness, grow food and understand the brain.
WildBear
The Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science – awarded at Parliament House in Canberra tonight – recognise excellence in science and science teaching. This year, we asked four prizewinners to reflect on their…
What will you remember?
Test via Syda Productions/Shutterstock
Teachers give tests to find out what their students know. But tests do a lot more than that and can have a powerful effect on what a student remembers. In a typical research study looking at the links…
What does your memory palace look like?
Byelikova Oksana/Shutterstock
To understand where we are, we must remember where we’ve been. This is one central theme that emerges from the work of new Nobel laureates John O’Keefe and May-Britt and Edvard Moser, whose neuroscientific…
Time is in our hands, more than we realise.
Flickr, Spanish Flea
We are curious about time. It holds us in a state of wonder, of anticipation for the future. The ability to categorise the past - history - and think about the future - planning - is a basic element of…
What lines of poetry are wandering through your memory?
freefotouk
Is there a poem buried deep in the recesses of your memory? Earlier this month, on the UK’s National Poetry Day, we launched a nationwide poetry survey inviting people to tell us a poem they know by heart…
The hippocampus has been object of scrutiny since the days of Gray’s Anatomy.
This year’s Nobel Prize in medicine recognises work on “cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.” Those cells are found in the hippocampus. It is just one tiny part of the brain, but this…
The curious want to know more and can remember more.
Flickr/Wagner T Cassimiro Aranha
The more curious we are about a topic, the easier it is to remember not only information about that topic, but also other unrelated information shown at the same time. A study published today in Neuron…
Want more working memory? Then you need to expand your brain.
Flickr/Elena Gatti
Before we had mobile phones, people had to use their own memory to store long phone numbers (or write them down). But getting those numbers into long-term memory could be a real pain. People had to write…
Memories from early childhood are notoriously elusive but why can’t we recall our most formative experiences? New research suggests it could be a case of the old making way for the new – neurons, that…
Ever since Leo Kanner wrote the first clinical description of early childhood autism in 1943, much of the material that has been written relates to parents and their experiences of having a child with…
Repeat after me: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall …
Pregnant woman via Shutterstock
As technology advances so does our ability to monitor unborn babies. Now it’s even possible to track how a very young fetus, still in its mother’s womb, learns and remembers basic speech. As a labour and…