Category: Memory

Stress you expect — not stress you experience — may be the real enemy to memory.

Anticipating stress messes with your memory.

People who wake up feeling the day will be stressful have worse memory later on, even if the stress does not materialise.

Dr Jinshil Hyun, the study’s first author, said:

“Humans can think about and anticipate things before they happen, which can help us prepare for and even prevent certain events.

But this study suggests that this ability can also be harmful to your daily memory function, independent of whether the stressful events actually happen or not.”

Working memory was the type affected by anticipating stress.

Dr Martin Sliwinski, study co-author, explained its function:

“A reduced working memory can make you more likely to make a mistake at work or maybe less able to focus.

Also, looking at this research in the context of healthy aging, there are certain high stakes cognitive errors that older adults can make.

Taking the wrong pill or making a mistake while driving can all have catastrophic impacts.”

Morning worry

For the study, 240 people were followed over two weeks to measure their stress levels and working memory ability.

Dr Hyun said:

“Having the participants log their stress and cognition as they went about their day let us get a snapshot of how these processes work in the context of real, everyday life.

We were able to gather data throughout the day over a longer period of time, instead of just a few points in time in a lab.”

The more people anticipated stress, the worse their memory was.

Dr Sliwinski said:

“When you wake up in the morning with a certain outlook for the day, in some sense the die is already cast.

If you think your day is going to be stressful, you’re going to feel those effects even if nothing stressful ends up happening.

That hadn’t really been shown in the research until now, and it shows the impact of how we think about the world.”

One option would be to fight the damaging effects of anticipating stress, Dr Sliwinski said:

“If you wake up and feel like the day is going to be stressful, maybe your phone can remind you to do some deep breathing relaxation before you start your day.

Or if your cognition is at a place where you might make a mistake, maybe you can get a message that says now might not be the best time to go for a drive.”

The study was published in the The Journals of Gerontology: Series B (Hyun et al., 2018).

New memories are likely to be lost unless they are consolidated correctly.

Rehearsing a memory for just 40 seconds could be the key to permanent recall.

When rehearsing a memory, the same area of the brain is activated as when laying it down.

This brain region — the posterior cingulate — is also the part that is damaged in Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr Chris Bird, who led the research, said:

“We know that recent memories are susceptible to being lost until a period of consolidation has elapsed.

In this study we have shown that a brief period of rehearsal has a huge effect on our ability to remember complex, lifelike events over periods of 1-2 weeks.

We have also linked this rehearsal effect to processing in a particular part of the brain — the posterior cingulate.”

In the study people were shown 26 YouTube clips.

For most of the videos, people spent 40 seconds going over the events.

They did this either mentally or out loud.

Two weeks later, non-rehearsed videos were mostly forgotten.

In contrast, people remembered many of the details of the videos they had spent just 40 seconds rehearsing.

It didn’t matter if they went over them mentally or out loud.

Brain scans revealed that the more the activity matched when watching and rehearsing, the more people could remember.

Dr Bird said:

“The findings have implications for any situation where accurate recall of an event is critical, such as witnessing an accident or crime.

Memory for the event will be significantly improved if the witness rehearses the sequence of events as soon as possible afterwards.”

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience (Bird et al., 2015).

Psychologists asked people to play a classic memory game, sometimes called Concentration or Pairs — half were allowed to take notes.

Making notes can actually reduce what you remember.

In a reverse of what many people expect, writing down information causes it to be flushed from memory.

We seem to intentionally forget what we write down.

Concentration

To prove it psychologists asked people to play a classic memory game, sometimes called Concentration, Pairs or just Memory.

A whole pack of cards is spread out across the table face-down.

Then each person turns over two cards, looking for a matching number (or picture) card.

You repeat this, turn by turn, and the winner is the person who gets the most pairs.

For the study, half were allowed to make notes about the locations of the cards, the other half not.

Here’s the trick, though: those allowed to make notes had them taken away before they were tested on the locations and identities of the cards.

The study’s authors write:

“One might have predicted that the note-taking group should show evidence of having better memory for the identity and location of the cards, as it could be argued that the form of studying that they were engaged in was more active and elaborate than the forms used by the study group.”

However, the study showed the exact reverse, as the authors explain:

“[the results showed] participants in the note-taking group remembered significantly less location information than did participants in the study group.

These results are suggestive that note-takers intentionally forgot the location information.”

The reason, then, is that the brain says to itself: “Well, I’ve written this information down, so there is no need to remember it!”

The authors write:

“Not unlike a person using a day planner to keep track of appointments, the results indicate that participants relied on their notes as an external store for the cards’ locations.”

So, be careful what you make a note of, especially if you think you might lose the notes!

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The study was published in the journal Memory & Cognition (Eskritt & Ma, 2014).