How Memory Works

The role of sleep in consolidating memory is now well-established, but recent research suggests that sleep also reorganizes memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas.

The number of items a person can hold in short-term memory is strongly correlated with their IQ. But short-term memory has been recently found to vary along another dimension as well: some people remember (‘see’) the items in short-term memory more clearly and precisely than other people.

Because people with damage to their hippocampus are sometimes impaired at remembering spatial information even over extremely short periods of time, it has been thought that the hippocampus is crucial for spatial information irrespective of whether the task is a working memory or a long-term memo

Metamemory or metacognition — your ability to monitor your own cognitive processes — is central to efficient and effective learning.

Commercial use is a long way off, but research with mice offers hope for a ‘smart drug’ that doesn’t have the sort of nasty side-effects that, for example, amphetamines have.

Manipulation of nearly 16 million individual samples of scores and more than 8 trillion individual scores on commonly used tests, including civil service and other pre-employment exams and university entrance exams, has revealed that the tools used to check tests of "general mental ability" for b

Previous research has found that individual neurons can become tuned to specific concepts or categories. We can have "cat" neurons, and "car" neurons, and even an “Angelina Jolie” neuron.

Perhaps we should start thinking of language less as some specialized process and more as one approach to thought.

It’s now well established that sleep plays an important role in memory and learning. Now a new study suggests that dreams also play a part in consolidating memories.

Visual working memory, which can only hold three of four objects at a time, is thought to be based on synchronized brain activity across a network of brain regions. Now a new study has allowed us to get a better picture of how exactly that works.