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When estrogen helps memory, and when it doesn’t

Recent rodent studies confirm attention and learning is more difficult for women when estrogen is high, but estrogen therapy can help menopausal women — if given during a critical window.

Recent rodent studies add to our understanding of how estrogen affects learning and memory.

Have I done it?

Watching another person do something can leave you with the memory of having done it yourself.

I’m not at all sure why the researcher says they were “stunned” by these findings, since it doesn’t surprise me in the least, but a series of experiments into the role of imagination in creating false memories has revealed that people who had watched a video of someone else doing a simple action

Face-blindness an example of inability to generalize

It seems that prosopagnosia can be, along with perfect pitch and eidetic memory, an example of what happens when your brain can’t abstract the core concept.

‘Face-blindness’ — prosopagnosia — is a condition I find fascinating, perhaps because I myself have a touch of it (it’s now recognized that this condition represents the end of a continuum rather than being an either/or proposition).

Adults recall negative events less accurately than children

A word experiment shows that unpleasant or traumatic events are likely to be inaccurately remembered, and this memory distortion increases with age. The findings have implications for eyewitness testimony.

Findings that children are less likely than adults to distort memories when negative emotions are evoked has significant implications for the criminal justice system.

Interruptions associated with medication errors by nurses

A study of medication administrations in hospitals has found scarily high rates of procedural and clinical failures, of which 2.7% were considered to be major errors — which were much more likely to occur after interruptions, particularly repeated interruptions. Nurse experience provided no protection and indeed was associated with higher procedural failure rates (common with procedural failures — expertise renders you more vulnerable, not less).

As we all know, being interrupted during a task greatly increases the chance we’ll go off-kilter (I discuss the worst circumstances and how you can minimize the risk of mistakes in my book Planning to remember).

1 in 40 of us really can multitask

A study assessing multitasking ability has found that a very few (5 out of 200) were unaffected by doing two complex tasks simultaneously (indeed their performance on the memory task improved!).

A study assessing the performance of 200 people on a simulated freeway driving task, with or without having a cell phone conversation that involved memorizing words and solving math problems, has found that, as expected, performance on both tasks was significantly impaired.

Childhood concussions impair brain function two years later
  • A small study found children who had experienced a sports-related concussion two years earlier still showed cognitive impairments, with younger children showing greater deficits.

A study involving 30 children (aged 8-10), of whom 15 had experienced a sports-related concussion two years earlier, and all of whom were athletically active, found that those with a history of concussion performed worse on tests of working memory, attention and impulse control, compared to the c

The right diet may slow cognitive decline in stroke survivors
  • An observational study involving over 100 stroke survivors suggests the MIND diet may help substantially slow cognitive decline in those impaired by stroke.

A pilot study involving 106 participants of the Rush Memory and Aging Project who had experienced a stroke followed participants for an average of 5.9 years, testing their cognitive function and monitoring their eating habits using food journals.

Trauma changes the brain even in those without PTSD
  • A review of previous research has compared brain activity in those with PTSD who experienced trauma, those who experienced trauma but didn't develop PTSD, and those who never experienced trauma.
  • Those who had PTSD had differential activity in two brain regions.
  • Those who had experienced trauma had differential activity in several brain regions associated with emotional regulation, regardless of whether they'd developed PTSD.

A meta-analysis of studies reporting brain activity in individuals with a diagnosis of PTSD has revealed differences between the brain activity of individuals with PTSD and that of groups of both trauma-exposed (those who had experienced trauma but didn't have a diagnosis of PTSD) and trauma-naïv

Is PTSD a failure of context processing?
  • A new theory suggests a single dysfunction, in the processing of context, could underlie the multiple symptoms and characteristics of PTSD.

An interesting new theory for PTSD suggests that the root of the problem lies in context processing problems.

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