Can We Learn To Forget Our Memories? : Shots - Health Blog
hide captionResearch shows that under certain circumstances, we can train ourselves to forget details about particular memories. iStockphoto.com Around 10 years ago, Malcolm MacLeod got interested in forgetting. For most people, the tendency to forget is something we spend our time cursing. Where are my keys? What am I looking for in the refrigerator again? That time in fourth grade when you walked down the hall with your skirt tucked into the back of your underwear, if you sat down and practiced forgetting, could you erase it? Certainly there were people who competed in memory competitions who practiced techniques for remembering and were wildly successful. Still, they were curious. Blocking Memories With Practice MacLeod and Noreen weren't the first to experiment with intentional forgetting. And so MacLeod and Noreen took this technique as a starting point and invited a series of people into their lab. MacLeod and Noreen showed the subjects 16 of the 24 words over and over and over.
Tesla - Master of Lightning: A Weapon to End War
Tesla inherited from his father a deep hatred of war. Throughout his life, he sought a technological way to end warfare. He thought that war could be converted into, "a mere spectacle of machines." In 1931 Tesla announced to reporters at a press conference that he was on the verge of discovering an entirely new source of energy. War clouds were again darkening Europe. The idea generated considerable interest and controversy. By 1937 it was clear that war would soon break out in Europe. What set Tesla's proposal apart from the usual run of fantasy "death rays" was a unique vacuum chamber with one end open to the atmosphere. Of all the countries to receive Tesla's proposal, the greatest interest came from the Soviet Union. Tesla hoped that his invention would be used for purely defensive purposes, and thus would become an anti-war machine. Tesla also contemplated peacetime applications for his particle beam, one being to transmit power without wires over long distances.
Touring the brain
Evolution has created a staggering range of organisms, each with features cleverly honed for its environmental niche. But while evolution is a fantastic creator, adding almost whatever is needed, it is surprisingly lazy at tidying up after itself, at pruning what is no longer required. In the bacterial world, where margins for survival may be razor sharp, things are more efficient. But most animals carry with them a surplus of obsolete features, such as the astronomical quantities of pathological DNA interlopers that sit in every cell in our bodies. But there are also more large-scale examples of detritus we endure. For instance, whenever we get cold, our hair duly stands on end to create a buffer of trapped air around our skins, as if such an action would make any difference to keep us cocooned from the cold—it doesn’t (unlike other primates, we simply don’t have enough hair to make this automatic response functional). The cortex, too, exhibits a surprising degree of redundancy.
Part of Nature cartoon by Stuart McMillen - Recombinant Records
This cartoon is heavily influenced by the books Natural Capitalism - Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins (1999) and Mid-Course Correction - Ray Anderson (1998). It is also in the same vein as the flash animation "The Story of Stuff" by Annie Leonard, which I watched when I was about 90% of the way through the drawing process. Back to post / website. View/add comments for this article.Part of Nature by Stuart McMillen.
In the Shadow of Hegel: How Does Thought Arise Out of Matter? | Postcards from Žižek
What's the Big Idea? Before neuroscience and quantum physics, there was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The 19th century German idealist revolutionized Western thought, and every great thinker since has been working in his shadow, says Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. Watch the video interview: Often seen as a precursor to Marxists and existentialists, Hegel believed that knowledge is not static, but dynamic. But what does it mean in a world where cognitive scientists can see brain function on an fMRI scan, capture the visual data, and reassemble it into videos using quantitative modeling? What's the Significance? Reductionists like Stephen Hawking may give the impression that contemporary science is uniquely capable of answering the big questions, like Does the world have an end? Which is why he's calling for the rehabilitation of classical philosophy: for contemporary philosophers to engage with the work of scientists and vice versa.
From Sci-Fi to Sci-Fact: The New Frontier of Neuroscience | Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa
With rendition switcher Question: What is the most exciting part of brain science for you? Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa: I think the most exciting part of what I do right now is exactly the fact that what we are doing is giving patients new hope; that we're looking at a disease, which is brain cancer, that people have looked at for hundreds of years and we have not been able to understand, and we're finally perhaps beginning to scratch the surface, we're beginning to look at an old disease with new eyes. And what new eyes are those is the fact that within brain cancer there may be a small population of cells that have the ability to recreate the same type of cancer, which means that despite the fact that we can actually do a perfect surgical resection and we can take a lot of these tumors out, these patients eventually continue to progress, perhaps because we're leaving those small little cells back there that are able to recreate the whole tumor. Recorded on: July 2, 2008
Brain Bugs: Hallucinations, Forgotten Faces, and Other Cognitive Quirks | Think Tank
What's the Big Idea? If seeing is believing, then how do we come to know? One common misperception holds that vision springs directly from the eyes. True, the eyes, ears, and skin bombard us with a constant stream of information. But sensory input is only the first step in a complex journey towards arriving at our understanding of the world. As neuroscientist V.S. What's the Significance? For neurologists like Ramachandran, "the question of how neurons encode meaning and evoke all the semantic associations of an object is the holy grail of neuroscience, whether you are studying memory, perception, art, or consciousness." This is because brain damage is highly specialized. John developed a blood clot in a vein in his leg, which traveled to his cerebral arteries, causing a stroke. There was nothing wrong with his vision or hearing. In John's case, the "wire between the vision and the amagydala," which regulates emotion, had been cut. Dan Honan contributed to this article.
The Neuroscience of Creativity and Insight | Think Tank
The Internet has a terrible habit of misquoting Einstein on energy and creativity until he sounds like he’s the author of , not the theory of relativity. Here’s something he actually did say . Describing the effect of music on his inner life, he told a friend: “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge.” Today, what Einstein believed intuitively – that insight was essential to scientific discovery and to the arts – can be observed methodically in the lab. Eric Kandel is a pioneer in the field who worked alongside Harry Grundfest in the very first NYC-based laboratory devoted to the study of the brain. “There are a group of people who have studied aspects of creativity,” he says. The ah-ha phenomenon or Eureka effect is the well-documented flash of insight that occurs when a solution just comes to you. Related Content Megan Erickson Dr.
