About memory

A survey of 257 epileptic patients and five clinicians has revealed that while patients ranked memory loss as their second-most important concern on a list of 20 potential medical or social concerns, memory loss was ranked only 12th by the clinicians.

Following earlier research suggesting mood affects attention, a new study tries to pin down exactly what it’s affecting.

A study involving 125 younger (average age 19) and older (average age 69) adults has revealed that while younger adults showed better explicit learning, older adults were better at implicit learning. Implicit memory is our unconscious memory, which influences behavior without our awareness.

Readers of my books and articles will know that

Binge drinking is, unfortunately, most common among adolescents (12-20 years). But this is a time when brains are still developing. Does this make them more vulnerable to the detrimental effects of excessive alcohol?

A two-year study involving 53 older adults (60+) has found that those with a mother who had Alzheimer's disease had significantly more brain atrophy than those with a father or no parent with Alzheimer's disease.

Data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging, begun in 1958, has revealed that seniors with hearing loss are significantly more likely to develop dementia than those who retain their hearing.

Shrinking of the

In a study designed to minimize flaws found in many earlier studies, a comparison of 52 illicit ecstasy users and 59 matched non-users, aged 18–45 years, revealed little evidence of decreased cognitive performance in ecstasy users, with the exception of poorer strategic self-regulation, possibly

A new molecular compound derived from curcumin (found in turmeric) holds promise for treating brain damage caused by stroke. Turmeric has a long history of use in Ayurvedic and Chinese traditional medicine.

A study involving 38 people suffering from mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) has found that those receiving acupressure treatments from trained experts (eight treatments over 4 weeks) scored significantly better on tests of

In the first of three experiments, 132 students were found to gesture more often when they had difficulties solving mental rotation problems.

In a study involving 44 young adults given a rigorous memorizing task at noon and another such task at 6pm, those who took a 90-minute nap during the interval improved their ability to learn on the later task, while those who stayed awake found it harder to learn.

Two experiments involving a total of 191 volunteers have investigated the parameters of sleep’s effect on learning.

A study involving 725 black and Dominican pregnant women living in New York and, later, their 3-year-old children, has found that children who were more highly exposed to PBO in personal air samples taken during the third trimester of pregnancy scored 3.9 points lower on the Bayley Mental Develo

The new label of ‘metabolic syndrome’ applies to those having three or more of the following risk factors: high blood pressure, excess belly fat, higher than normal triglycerides, high blood sugar and low high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol (the "good" cholesterol).

We’ve all experienced the fading of our ability to concentrate when we’ve been focused on a task for too long. The dominant theory of why this should be so has been around for half a century, and describes attention as a limited resource that gets ‘used up’.

Lesions of the brain microvessels include white-matter hyperintensities and the much less common silent infarcts leading to loss of white-matter tissue.