Hey, there was no masthead on last week's open thread. I must have forgot.

Let's explore the memory and some hopefully memorable music.

THE HUMAN MEMORY

Since time immemorial, humans have tried to understand what memory is, how it works and why it goes wrong. It is an important part of what makes us truly human, and yet it is one of the most elusive and misunderstood of human attributes.

The popular image of memory is as a kind of tiny filing cabinet full of individual memory folders in which information is stored away, or perhaps as a neural super-computer of huge capacity and speed. However, in the light of modern biological and psychological knowledge, these metaphors may not be entirely useful and, today, experts believe that memory is in fact far more complex and subtle than that

It seems that our memory is located not in one particular place in the brain, but is instead a brain-wide process in which several different areas of the brain act in conjunction with one another (sometimes referred to as distributed processing). For example, the simple act of riding a bike is actively and seamlessly reconstructed by the brain from many different areas: the memory of how to operate the bike comes from one area, the memory of how to get from here to the end of the block comes from another, the memory of biking safety rules from another, and that nervous feeling when a car veers dangerously close comes from still another. Each element of a memory (sights, sounds, words, emotions) is encoded in the same part of the brain that originally created that fragment (visual cortex, motor cortex, language area, etc), and recall of a memory effectively reactivates the neural patterns generated during the original encoding. Thus, a better image might be that of a complex web, in which the threads symbolize the various elements of a memory, that join at nodes or intersection points to form a whole rounded memory of a person, object or event. This kind of distributed memory ensures that even if part of the brain is damaged, some parts of an experience may still remain. Neurologists are only beginning to understand how the parts are reassembled into a coherent whole.

How the Brain's Overstuffed Filing System Fails

Age is not entirely to blame for forgetfulness.

The reason that some people are absentminded and others have minds like a steel-trap might have more to do with how the brain files memories and makes room for new ones, new research suggests.

The overstuffed file system that collects daily to-do's while keeping track of childhood memories has remained an enigma, especially regarding the mechanism for such mega-bit storage amidst the deluge of incoming bytes.

Auditory Memory: The Overlooked Learning Skill Deficiency

A weakness in auditory memory can have serious consequences in the realm of learning for students, states educational therapist Addie Cusimano in her book Learning Disabilities: There is a Cure.

Auditory memory involves being able to take in information that is presented orally, to process that information, store it in one's mind and then recall what one has heard. Basically, it involves the skills of attending, listening, processing, storing, and recalling. Because students with auditory memory weaknesses pick up only bits and pieces of what is being said during a classroom lecture, they make sense of only little of what is said by the teacher. Afterwards they are able to recall only a small amount or none of what was said, says Cusimano.

"Students with auditory memory deficiencies will often experience difficulty developing a good understanding of words, remembering terms and information that has been presented orally, for example, in history and science classes."

"These students will also experience difficulty processing and recalling information that they have read to themselves. When we read we must listen and process information we say to ourselves, even when we read silently. If we do not attend and listen to our silent input of words, we cannot process the information or recall what we have read. Therefore, even silent reading involves a form of listening," says Cusimano.

Is the cold duck good for memory?

Red Wine Compound May Improve Memory, Study Suggests

A substance found in red wine and dark chocolate that has been touted for its supposed anti-aging effects may improve people's memory, new research suggests.

In a study of overweight adults, those who took resveratrol supplements for six months had better short-term recall than their counterparts who took a placebo. The people who took the supplement also had more connections among brain areas involved in memory, and this paralleled improvements over the study period in their ability to break down sugar in the body, researchers found.

This small pilot study, detailed Wednesday (June 4) in the Journal of Neuroscience, is the first to show a link between the red wine compound and cognition in overweight adults, said Veronica Witte, a neuroscientist at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in Germany. [6 Foods That Are Good for Your Brain]

"From a clinical point of view, our findings suggest that regular, high-level intake of resveratrol in the elderly may convey protective effects on cognitive functions, a hypothesis that now needs to be evaluated in large-scale clinical trials," Witte told Live Science.

Gee, do you think that last article was sponsored by anybody?

When Sweetie lost the ability to roll over, the ubiquitous advice was to get a memory foam mattress, along with a movable frame. The memory foam facilitates lying in one position all night.

How to Choose the Right Mattress

Is it time for a new mattress? Do you wake up tired or achy, or does your mattress look saggy or lumpy? Or maybe you sleep better at hotels. If you dread a trip to Sears or Sleepy’s, realize that you've got more options than ever before—department and specialty stores are no longer the default destination. Now great mattresses at fair prices can be found at Costco and online retailers.

We test queen-size mattresses (60”w x 80”l) because they’re the most common size purchased. (For your reference, the other standard dimensions are king, 76x80 inches; California king, 72x84; full, or double, 53x75; and twin, 38x75.) We subject each mattress to a battery of tests, including running a 308-pound roller over each one 30,000 times to simulate 8 to 10 years of use. Still, there’s much to know even before you start shopping. Here’s your path to a good night’s sleep.

The memory foam is 'different'. When you first lie down, it is uncomfortable, after a couple of minutes it feels good. It is more difficult to change positions and you have to go through the couple of minutes adjusting to the new position.

About Sleep's Role in Memory

Abstract
Over more than a century of research has established the fact that sleep benefits the retention of memory. In this review we aim to comprehensively cover the field of “sleep and memory” research by providing a historical perspective on concepts and a discussion of more recent key findings. Whereas initial theories posed a passive role for sleep enhancing memories by protecting them from interfering stimuli, current theories highlight an active role for sleep in which memories undergo a process of system consolidation during sleep. Whereas older research concentrated on the role of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, recent work has revealed the importance of slow-wave sleep (SWS) for memory consolidation and also enlightened some of the underlying electrophysiological, neurochemical, and genetic mechanisms, as well as developmental aspects in these processes. Specifically, newer findings characterize sleep as a brain state optimizing memory consolidation, in opposition to the waking brain being optimized for encoding of memories. Consolidation originates from reactivation of recently encoded neuronal memory representations, which occur during SWS and transform respective representations for integration into long-term memory. Ensuing REM sleep may stabilize transformed memories. While elaborated with respect to hippocampus-dependent memories, the concept of an active redistribution of memory representations from networks serving as temporary store into long-term stores might hold also for non-hippocampus-dependent memory, and even for nonneuronal, i.e., immunological memories, giving rise to the idea that the offline consolidation of memory during sleep represents a principle of long-term memory formation established in quite different physiological systems.

Remember to have a great weekend!