Thursday, 23 March 2017
When You Come Into a Room and Forget What You Were Going To Do There
Of all the psychological effects that have been given specific names (the placebo effect, the McGurk effect, the Coolidge effect, etc.), the “doorway effect” is one of the most familiar and yet also one of the most surprising. We have all experienced it: you’re at home, you go from one room into another, and then you forget what you were planning to do there!
As the first article linked to below notes, the French poet Paul Valéry once said that the purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best. In this sense, the doorway effect might be considered a perfect example of the kinds of phenomena that psychologists study. (more…)
Memory and the Brain | No comments
Wednesday, 22 February 2017
To Retain Information Better, Wait a Few Hours, Then Go for a Run!
The study that I want to tell you about today was done by Eelco V. van Dongen and his colleagues and is entitled “Physical Exercise Performed Four Hours after Learning Improves Memory Retention and Increases Hippocampal Pattern Similarity during Retrieval.”
This study’s findings can be summed up as follows: if you have just made a new mental association and want to remember it better, wait a couple of hours, and then go do some exercise! In van Dongen’s study, three groups of subjects performed a memory-encoding task. One group performed exercise immediately after, one did so four hours after, and the third did not perform any exercise at all. When the three groups were tested for their retention of the encoded memory two days afterward, the group that had exercised four hours after the task showed the best retention among the three groups. (more…)
Memory and the Brain | No comments
Friday, 10 February 2017
You Don’t Catch a Ball by Calculating Its Trajectory, You Catch It by Moving
Today I’d like to talk about a problem that is a classic both for baseball players and for cognitive scientists. And the way that baseball players solve it has helped cognitive scientists to better understand the important role that the body plays in cognition.
The problem is as follows: how does a baseball player go about catching a baseball that has been hit high into the air, especially when the player is in centre field and the ball is following a long, parabolic trajectory that would otherwise cause it to land several metres from where the player is standing? How does the player go about calculating this trajectory and moving, in just a few seconds, to the right place to catch the ball? This is what has long been known in English as “the outfielder problem.” (If you’re more of a soccer fan, imagine a backfielder successfully heading a long throw-in by the goalkeeper.) (more…)
Body Movement and the Brain | No comments
Monday, 9 January 2017
A First Brain-Imaging Study on the Effects of LSD
“This is to neuroscience what the Higgs boson was to particle physics.”
This eye-catching remark comes from neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt, and he is talking about a study on which he was the senior researcher: “Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging”, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April 2016. And like the results of the research on the Higgs boson, the results of Nutt’s study confirmed the theory—in this case, that the observed changes in brain activity would provide a very good picture of the mental state produced by an “acid trip”. (more…)
The Emergence of Consciousness | No comments
Monday, 12 December 2016
Some Amazing Predictions Based on Brain Connectivity
This week, I’d like to tell you about two very interesting articles. The first, by Emily S. Finn and her colleagues, was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in October 2015 and is entitled “Functional connectome fingerprinting: identifying individuals using patterns of brain connectivity.” As its title suggests, Finn’s research team successfully identified individuals from patterns not on their fingertips, but rather in their brains! (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex | No comments
