Benedict Carey

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“Most Store The Studied Material In A So-Called Memory Palace”

May 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a New York Times report by Benedict Carey about lessons learned at the inaugural Extreme Memory Tournament, which was held recently in San Diego, the upshot is not that some have remarkably elastic recall, but that they thrive at visualization and focus. I would still think, however, that such abilities are more pronounced in some brains than others. An excerpt:

“‘We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us,’ said Henry L. Roediger III, the psychologist who led the research team, ‘is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention.’

The technique the competitors use is no mystery.

People have been performing feats of memory for ages, scrolling out pi to hundreds of digits, or phenomenally long verses, or word pairs. Most store the studied material in a so-called memory palace, associating the numbers, words or cards with specific images they have already memorized; then they mentally place the associated pairs in a familiar location, like the rooms of a childhood home or the stops on a subway line.

The Greek poet Simonides of Ceos is credited with first describing the method, in the fifth century B.C., and it has been vividly described in popular books, most recently Moonwalking With Einstein, by Joshua Foer.

Each competitor has his or her own variation. ‘When I see the eight of diamonds and the queen of spades, I picture a toilet, and my friend Guy Plowman,’ said Ben Pridmore, 37, an accountant in Derby, England, and a former champion. ‘Then I put those pictures on High Street in Cambridge, which is a street I know very well.’

As these images accumulate during memorization, they tell an increasingly bizarre but memorable story. ‘I often use movie scenes as locations,’ said James Paterson, 32, a high school psychology teacher in Ascot, near London, who competes in world events. ‘In the movie Gladiator, which I use, there’s a scene where Russell Crowe is in a field, passing soldiers, inspecting weapons.'”

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“Now Comes A New Kind Of Challenge To The Evidence Of A Cognitive Decline”

January 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Since copies of cells are less perfect than healthy original ones, I would assume some cognitive decline occurs over time, that our brains deteriorate as do our other organs. But the age-decline of brain matter has probably always been somewhat overstated; we forget more over time simply because we have inelastic memories that are taxed by a surfeit of information collected over a lifetime. Perhaps we know too much. That’s why it’s a good thing, not a scary thing, for some of our data to be stored in computers, for our heads to be in the cloud. We just don’t have the necessary space for so much information. We can’t fit it all in our heads. We need more room.

From “The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind,” by Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

“Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing. In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases.

Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging ‘deficits’ largely disappeared.

‘What shocked me, to be honest, is that for the first half of the time we were doing this project, I totally bought into the idea of age-related cognitive decline in healthy adults,’ the lead author, Michael Ramscar, said by email. But the simulations, he added, ‘fit so well to human data that it slowly forced me to entertain this idea that I didn’t need to invoke decline at all.”

Can it be?”

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“He Was Recognized As The Most Important Patient In The History Of Brain Science”

August 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m always fascinated by memory, especially in the extreme. Those who have the rare ability to stretch what is seemingly inelastic are fascinating, but so are those with huge potholes in their past. And some of us consistently reorder what’s transpired to suit us, seemingly a reflexive, subconscious defense mechanism. 

Because I don’t have amnesia, I was just thinking about an obituary I read several years ago about Henry Molaison, who was a profound amnesiac. From Benedict Carey in the December 4, 2008 New York Times:

“He knew his name. That much he could remember.

He knew that his father’s family came from Thibodaux, La., and his mother was from Ireland, and he knew about the 1929 stock market crash and World War II and life in the 1940s.

But he could remember almost nothing after that.

In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories.

For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time.

And for those five decades, he was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science. “

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“The Monkeys Were Implanted With A Tiny Probe With Two Sensors”

September 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Eventually you’ll have the implant, but right now monkeys get it first. From Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

“In the study, researchers at Wake Forest trained five rhesus monkeys to play a picture-matching game. The monkeys saw an image on a large screen — of a toy, a person, a mountain range — and tried to select the same image from a larger group of images that appeared on the same screen a little while later. The monkeys got a treat for every correct answer.

After two years of practice, the animals developed some mastery, getting about 75 percent of the easier matches correct and 40 percent of the harder ones, markedly better than chance guessing.

The monkeys were implanted with a tiny probe with two sensors; it was threaded through the forehead and into two neighboring layers of the cerebral cortex, the thin outer covering of the brain.”

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“The Defendant Had Inherited A Gene Linked To Violent, Aggressive Behavior”

August 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You can keep going around in this circle for a long time: Criminals who have brain defects have less control over their actions so judges have a tendency to give them shorter sentences so they are returned sooner to society where they have less control over their actions. That’s at least the in vitro conclusion drawn from a recent experiment that presented neurobiological evidence to judges in hypothetical cases. From Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

“In the study, three researchers at the University of Utah tracked down 181 state judges from 19 states who agreed to read a fictional case file and assign a sentence to an offender, ‘Jonathan Donahue,’ convicted of beating a restaurant manager senseless with the butt of a gun. All of the judges learned in their files that Mr. Donahue had been identified as a psychopath based on a standard interview — that is, he had a history of aggressive acts without showing empathy.

The case files distributed to the judges were identical, except that half included testimony from a scientist described as ‘a neurobiologist and renowned expert on the causes of psychopathy,’ who said that the defendant had inherited a gene linked to violent, aggressive behavior. This testimony described how the gene variant altered the development of brain areas that generate and manage emotion.

The account is an accurate description of one theory of how brain development may underlie aggressive behavior. Its applicability to any individual is unknown, however, given that many other factors could increase the likelihood of violence, researchers said.

The judges who read this testimony gave Mr. Donahue sentences that ranged from one to 41 years in prison, a number that varied with state guidelines. But the average was 13 years — a full year less than the average sentence issued by the judges who had not seen the testimony about genetics and the brain.”

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“What’s Really New Here Is This Movement Toward Crowd-Sourcing Brain Research”

April 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Crowdsourcing is now at the service of scientific inquiry into intelligence and memory, as reported in an article by Benedict Carey in the New York Times. The opening:

“In the largest collaborative study of the brain to date, scientists using imaging technology at more than 100 centers worldwide have for the first time zeroed in on genes that they agree play a role in intelligence and memory.

Scientists working to understand the biology of brain function — and especially those using brain imaging, a blunt tool — have been badly stalled. But the new work, involving more than 200 scientists, lays out a strategy for breaking the logjam. The findings appear in a series of papers published online Sunday in the journal Nature Genetics.

‘What’s really new here is this movement toward crowd-sourcing brain research,’ said Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior author of one of the papers. ‘This is an example of social networking in science, and it gives us a power we have not had.'”

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An earlier, less-clinical group memory study:

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