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I ran up stairs to get something now I can't remember what it was.
Sound familiar has this happen to you?
Meet Memory expert, Dr Adam Gazzaley, professor of
neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco.
Your Working Memory This is where you hold bits of information for short periods of time, the classical example being a telephone number - hearing it, holding it, then dialing it.
The trouble is, working memory is one of the first things
not to work. It's what's not working when you dash upstairs
to get something and when you get there can't remember what
it is.
"A lot of adults feel that the incidence of that failure
increases as they get older,' Dr Gazzaley says. 'Have you
noticed that?"
"Actually, yes," I say.
These are the sorts of problems he's recreating under lab conditions here.
The enemy of working memory is distraction. A 2005 study showed that older people find it more difficult to screen out what's irrelevant.
Dr Gazzaley's findings suggest that how good you are at remembering things is influenced not so much by how well you
keep your eye on the ball but how well you ignore the crowd.
But why do brains get worse with age? Do the cells just die off? Not exactly, he says. "Historically, we thought that
was the case.
The brain does decrease in size but a lot of that is water.
The impression in the field now is that it's more of a functional and chemical change than cell loss, which is good
because those things are more amenable to intervention.
Maybe we can manipulate it back, perhaps with some combination of medications and training."
I ask what he thinks about video games like Nintendo. "I
haven't seen much empirical evidence that they do what they
say they do.
There's no doubt that using your brain in an active way is
good for you, but training should be evaluated in a large-scale test across the population."
The problem with games, he says, is that everyone improves with practice.
What you're really looking to achieve is "generalisability".
Improving your ability to track the movements of hot-air balloons is all very handy, but does it translate into
better conversation or driving skills?
My goal in this lab is to find a way to manipulate the brain on a fundamental level that generalizes across many different abilities."
The most common finding in aging is the decreased speed of
processing. He says it's no different to the way all our
responses get slower as we get older - hand-eye co-ordination, taking a beat more to adjust our minds to oncoming hazards.
One of the great things in the past decade, though, he says,
has been the advent of new neuroimaging technology (fMRI scanners) which has enabled researchers to watch the brain
'lighting up' as it carries out tasks and to gather new
data in the battle to remember better and - lest we forget
- the bigger battle against dementia.
The reporter then heads off to New York.
I'm in New York for the Memory Championships. They call it
the Olympics of the Mind.
I meet up with last year's winner - David Thomas, an ex- fireman from Halifax.
He hasn't entered this year, he says, because he's busy with
a TV project that will involve him sitting in a plastic box
for five days - "David Blaine style" - outside a Las Vegas
casino, remembering 101 packs of cards
Random numbers are his thing. He is in Guinness World Records for being able to recite Pi to 22,500 decimal points.
I can't even begin to imagine that many numbers, but I
scribble down 20 or so now in my notebook and get him to
remember those. It takes him about three seconds.
http://www.5minutelearningmachine.com/mindpowermiracles.html
Sound familiar has this happen to you?
Meet Memory expert, Dr Adam Gazzaley, professor of
neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco.
Your Working Memory This is where you hold bits of information for short periods of time, the classical example being a telephone number - hearing it, holding it, then dialing it.
The trouble is, working memory is one of the first things
not to work. It's what's not working when you dash upstairs
to get something and when you get there can't remember what
it is.
"A lot of adults feel that the incidence of that failure
increases as they get older,' Dr Gazzaley says. 'Have you
noticed that?"
"Actually, yes," I say.
These are the sorts of problems he's recreating under lab conditions here.
The enemy of working memory is distraction. A 2005 study showed that older people find it more difficult to screen out what's irrelevant.
Dr Gazzaley's findings suggest that how good you are at remembering things is influenced not so much by how well you
keep your eye on the ball but how well you ignore the crowd.
But why do brains get worse with age? Do the cells just die off? Not exactly, he says. "Historically, we thought that
was the case.
The brain does decrease in size but a lot of that is water.
The impression in the field now is that it's more of a functional and chemical change than cell loss, which is good
because those things are more amenable to intervention.
Maybe we can manipulate it back, perhaps with some combination of medications and training."
I ask what he thinks about video games like Nintendo. "I
haven't seen much empirical evidence that they do what they
say they do.
There's no doubt that using your brain in an active way is
good for you, but training should be evaluated in a large-scale test across the population."
The problem with games, he says, is that everyone improves with practice.
What you're really looking to achieve is "generalisability".
Improving your ability to track the movements of hot-air balloons is all very handy, but does it translate into
better conversation or driving skills?
My goal in this lab is to find a way to manipulate the brain on a fundamental level that generalizes across many different abilities."
The most common finding in aging is the decreased speed of
processing. He says it's no different to the way all our
responses get slower as we get older - hand-eye co-ordination, taking a beat more to adjust our minds to oncoming hazards.
One of the great things in the past decade, though, he says,
has been the advent of new neuroimaging technology (fMRI scanners) which has enabled researchers to watch the brain
'lighting up' as it carries out tasks and to gather new
data in the battle to remember better and - lest we forget
- the bigger battle against dementia.
The reporter then heads off to New York.
I'm in New York for the Memory Championships. They call it
the Olympics of the Mind.
I meet up with last year's winner - David Thomas, an ex- fireman from Halifax.
He hasn't entered this year, he says, because he's busy with
a TV project that will involve him sitting in a plastic box
for five days - "David Blaine style" - outside a Las Vegas
casino, remembering 101 packs of cards
Random numbers are his thing. He is in Guinness World Records for being able to recite Pi to 22,500 decimal points.
I can't even begin to imagine that many numbers, but I
scribble down 20 or so now in my notebook and get him to
remember those. It takes him about three seconds.
http://www.5minutelearningmachine.com/mindpowermiracles.html
