Memories tagged posts

Respiration modulates olfactory memory consolidation in humans. The Journal of Neuroscience, 2018; 3360-17 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3360-17.2018

The way we breathe may affect how well our memories are consolidated (i.e. reinforced and stabilised). If we breathe through the nose rather than the mouth after trying to learn a set of smells, we remember them better, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden report in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Research into how breathing affects the brain has become an ever-more popular field in recent years and new methodologies have enabled more studies, many of which have concentrated on the memory. Researchers from Karolinska Institutet now show that participants who breathe through the nose consolidate their memories better.

“Our study shows that we ...

Mice were exposed to two auditory fear conditioning, separated by five hours. Both memories were encoded by shared neurons in the lateral amygdala while they were encoded by different neurons in the auditory cortex. Mice showed freezing behavior in response to 7kHz and 2kHz tones. Induction of optical long term depotentiation (LTD) to synapses specific to 7kHz fear memory, erased only that memory (test 3) without affecting the other memory (test 4) that was stored in shared neuron ensemble.
Credit: Kaoru Inokuchi, Kareem Abdou

Memories are formed through long-term changes in synaptic efficacy, a process known as synaptic plasticity, and are stored in the brain in specific neuronal ensembles called engram cells, which are activated during corresponding events...

Scientists at NIH used electrical recordings to study how the human brain remembers.
Credit: Courtesy of Zaghloul lab, NIH/NINDS

In a pair of studies, scientists at the National Institutes of Health explored how the human brain remembers. One study suggests that the brain etches each memory into unique firing patterns of individual neurons. Meanwhile, the second study suggests that the brain replays memories faster than they are stored. The studies were led by Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon-researcher at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). Persons with drug resistant epilepsy in protocols studying surgical resection of their seizure focus at the NIH’s Clinical Center enrolled in this study. To help locate the source of the seizures, Dr...

When a friend or relative visits, the Remember Me! app displays photos as a reminder of the connection to that person.

People suffering from Alzheimer’s and other forms of age-related dementia sometimes have trouble recognizing friends and family or knowing what to talk about when they visit. A new app created by a group of Cornell students offers to help patients stay connected to their memories – and thus to their friends and family – and perhaps will even help them keep a conversation going.

Remember Me! is a smartphone app developed by engineering master’s degree graduates Karthik Venkataramaiah, Vishal Kumkar, Shivananda Pujeri and Mihir Shah. They demonstrated their work at the 123rd Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education St...