Here’s a third article, about how memory can be fragile even in the healthiest of people. How reliable are witness statements? Not very reliable, according to the article. “A woman witnesses an accident involving a blue car hitting a signpost at a junction. Later, she is asked which way the red car approached the accident spot. She replies, from the left fork in the road. If she is then asked what colour the car was, she may well answer red rather than blue. Her memory is distorted by first question’s suggestion that the car was red.”

There’s another interesting bit further down the page. “The good news is that memory can be improved using simple tricks. Associating an unfamiliar object with a well-known place can help you retrieve the memory of the object more quickly by first imagining the place. This is known as the Method of Loci and is a common trick used by memory experts.”

“If you study for exams with music in the background, you may do better in your exams if you can listen to music while taking them. It’s easier to remember things if you place yourself in an environment where you earlier made use of them. So next time you lose your glasses, go back to the place you last remember seeing them. It will help jog your memory of what you subsequently did with them.” Good tip, but how useful is it to me?

The article waffles on about brain imaging, using something called functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the blood as it moves through the brain. “Blood continuously flows around the brain supplying oxygen and nutrients to billions of nerve cells, making the head one of the hottest regions of the body. If, for example, you are trying to remember a shopping list, cells in your prefrontal cortex will be sending more messages to neighbouring cells and brain regions. As they send the messages they ‘call out’ for more oxygen, so the blood rushes to the cells to supply them with oxygen. MRI measures the changes in oxygen in the blood.”

Blimey! It says here that scientists have built artificial brains called neural networks that can learn independently. They’re actually mathematical models of layers of brain cells connected together in different ways. Apparently these cells can rearrange their connections to store information in the network. Like in Terminator II, when Arnold Schwarzenegger rearranges the connections in his neural network processor to learn the right and wrong way to say “hasta la vista, baby”. But if too many memories are laid down over too many cells in the network, it overloads and goes from remembering lots of things to none at all – otherwise known as catastrophic forgetting.

Speaking of forgetting, what am I doing still standing at this bus stop? I’m hungry and my feet are sore. I hope someone comes soon, because I won’t be able to find my own way home. The hippocampus is supposed to help me navigate by storing a mental map of the world, but my map seems to have disintegrated since the accident. Wait – is that woman across the road waving at me? She seems to know me. She walks towards me. Perhaps I can borrow her mental map to find my way home…

For more information visit our web pages:
Hugo Spiers: www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/groups/JO/mempages/hugo/
Jenny Gimpel: www.jennygimpel.com

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