How does our memory work? What’s the difference between remembering how to ride a bike and recalling people’s names? Is it possible to improve your memory? An exhibition in the Science Gallery is looking for the answers, writes BRIAN O’CONNELL
REMEMBER A NAME but can’t match it with a face? Good with numbers but useless at childhood recollections? Led by Prof Shane O’Mara of Trinity College, Memory Lab is a month-long experience at Science Gallery in Trinity College, which invites the public to take part in a range of scientific experiments aimed at examining how our memory works.
In the new Hollywood thriller, ‘Limitless’, Bradley Cooper plays a failing writer who uses a top-secret ‘smart drug’ to unlock his brain’s potential. SYLVIA LEATHAM asks TCD neuroscientist Prof Shane O’Mara for a reality check on how the brain works.
I’m curating my first ever ‘lab in the gallery’ – details below. Dr Joanne Feeney, a postdoc in my group has been absolutely central to making this even happen, as has the great and creative team in the Science Gallery – Michael John, Rob, Maria, Lynn, Anja, Ian, Derek, Rosa (and John for superb computer programming).
So, think you have a good memory? Are you brave enough to put it to the test at Science Gallery’s MEMORY LAB this March?
FIRE, GOAT, PLUM, SUMP, VANE, HAIR, FARM... How come you can recall your first day at school vividly but won’t remember this list of words when you get to the bottom of this paragraph? Why are some of us memory champions while others have a heads like sieves? Is our ability to remember nature or nurture?
MEMORY LAB, a month-long LAB IN THE GALLERY experience at Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, invites the public to take part in a range of real, scientific experiments into how we remember or why we forget.
Eight separate experiments will investigate a range of aspects of functional memory from how good your short-term memory is to how and why we evolved memory in the first place. Be prepared for a barrage of information you will have to recall including numbers, letters, faces and even smells! We’re also inviting people to come and record their earliest ever memory as MEMORY LAB seeks to amass the largest database of earliest memories in the world.
The experimentation begins at Science Gallery on March 11th and continues until April 8th 2011. MEMORY LAB will also contain a rich events programme to allow you explore memory deeper – including a talk by former US Memory Champion and author of “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything” Joshua Foer. Events also include special recruitment event on how to make yourself memorable and Science Gallery’s first ever table quiz where you can put your ability to recall to the test.
MEMORY LAB opens to the public on March 11th and runs until April 8th. The experiments run Tuesday-Friday 12:00-20:00 and Saturday-Sunday 12:00-18:00. Admission free with a suggested donation of €5. You can be the first to experience MEMORY LAB by going to the exclusive preview party on March 10th. All Science Gallery MEMBERS+ go for free (sign up today here) or buy your tickets here.
This looks like a fantastic visualisation tool – but one that should prove useful as a research tool.
The Brain Systems, Connections, Associations, and Network Relationships (a phrase with more words than strictly necessary in order to bootstrap a good acronym) assumes that somewhere in all the chaos and noise of the more than 20 million papers on PubMed, there must be some order and rationality.
To that end, we have created a dictionary of hundreds of brain region names, cognitive and behavioral functions, and diseases (and their synonyms!) to find how often any two phrases co-occur in the scientific literature. We assume that the more often two terms occur together (at the exclusion of those words by themselves, without each other), the more likely they are to be associated.
Are there problems with this assumption? Yes, but we think you’ll like the results anyway. Obviously the database is limited to the words and phrases with which we have populated it. We also assume that when words co-occur in a paper, that relationship is a positive one (i.e., brain areas A and B are connected, as opposed to not connected). Luckily, there is a positive publication bias in the peer-reviewed biomedical sciences that we can leverage to our benefit (hooray biases)! Furthermore, we cannot dissociate English homographs; thus, a search for the phrase “rhythm” (to ascertain the brain regions associated with musical rhythm) gives the strongest association with the suprachiasmatic nucleus (that is, for circadian rhythms!)
Despite these limitations, we believe we have created a powerful visualization tool that will speed research and education, and hopefully allow for the discovery of new, previously unforeseen connections between brain, behavior, and disease.
H/T: Marsha Lucas
Posted by David Boaz
Matt Ridley’s new book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, is garnering rave reviews. Ridley, science writer and popularizer of evolutionary psychology, shows how it was trade and specialization of labor–and the resulting massive growth in technological sophistication–that hauled humanity from its impoverished past to its comparatively rich present. These trends will continue, he argues, and will solve many of today’s most pressing problems, from the spread of disease to the threat of climate change.
The Cato Institute has now presented three different looks at the book, with a review in the Cato Journal, another in Regulation, and an event at Cato with Matt Ridley himself.
FWIW, it is one of the most enjoyable books I have read this year, and a great counter to the pervasive misery-mongering rife. The tagline ‘ideas having sex’ is a great metaphor for the advancement of knowledge. Here is his TED talk – well worth watching.