Rewriting the Brain’s Stories

Our ability to learn is one of the great brain functions that keeps us young.  Learning can be considered moments when one pays focused attention to an experience and then encodes that experience as a memory which can then be retrieved at another time.  Each of our memories is then a story line regarding a […]

How Can Memory Improve Your Life?

According to Congressman Tim Ryan in his book A Mindful Nation, “When people have higher working memory capacity they can pay better attention, can solve problems more readily, and have more fluid intelligence–they use facts rather than just know them.  Those with strengthened working memory capacity also suffer less from emotionally charged thoughts and are better […]

Smoking, Memory Loss, and Aging Your Brain

According to Dr. Eric Braverman, author of Younger Brain, Sharper Mind, we unknowingly effect our brain speed and impair our memory recall circuits.  “A 2004 study in the Journal Neurology showed that over a 5-year period, memory decline for smokers was five times worse than that of nonsmokers…Nicotine is an effective stimulant that can improve […]

Memory as Fiction

Different aspects of memory are stored in different areas of the brain simultaneously. Memory retrieval is not like looking at a snapshot–it’s always a reconstruction and coming together of pieces and parts. So when we think we remember exactly what happened, it’s really a neurological rebuild or a version of the event. This is why […]

Multi-tasking Amnesia

Multi-tasking is productive but impairs memory retrieval greatly. Encoding of memories into the hippocampus happens best when the prefrontal cortex can focus on one thing at a time. How much of your life is fading away into the background because you are texting while doing something else? How much more cognitive presence can you have […]