Throughout our lives we have multitudes of experiences that shape how we then behave in the world. Some of these lessons are learnt rapidly, such as why we shouldn’t put our hand on a hot pan on the stove…
Families and friends share memories all the time; “You’ll never guess…”, “How was your day?”, and “Do you remember when…” are rich daily fodder. Sharing memories is not only a good way to debrief and reminisce…
Six weeks ago I arrived back in London after my first trip to Australia. It felt considerably colder than the 34 degrees we’d left behind in Sydney, but the skies were clear and blue. Or were they? My…
Twenty eyewitnesses testified before the grand jury investigating the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. None of these accounts is fully consistent with any other. Moreover, eyewitnesses…
Can you recall what you were doing last Wednesday between 2.15pm and 2.36pm? Where were you? What did you see? Who did you talk to? How well do you remember those 21 minutes? Now try to recall Wednesday…
The Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science – awarded at Parliament House in Canberra tonight – recognise excellence in science and science teaching. This year, we asked four prizewinners to reflect on…
Teachers give tests to find out what their students know. But tests do a lot more than that and can have a powerful effect on what a student remembers. In a typical research study looking at the links…
To understand where we are, we must remember where we’ve been. This is one central theme that emerges from the work of new Nobel laureates John O’Keefe and May-Britt and Edvard Moser, whose neuroscientific…
We are curious about time. It holds us in a state of wonder, of anticipation for the future. The ability to categorise the past - history - and think about the future - planning - is a basic element of…
Is there a poem buried deep in the recesses of your memory? Earlier this month, on the UK’s National Poetry Day, we launched a nationwide poetry survey inviting people to tell us a poem they know by heart…
This year’s Nobel Prize in medicine recognises work on “cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.” Those cells are found in the hippocampus. It is just one tiny part of the brain, but this…
The more curious we are about a topic, the easier it is to remember not only information about that topic, but also other unrelated information shown at the same time. A study published today in Neuron…
Before we had mobile phones, people had to use their own memory to store long phone numbers (or write them down). But getting those numbers into long-term memory could be a real pain. People had to write…
Memories from early childhood are notoriously elusive but why can’t we recall our most formative experiences? New research suggests it could be a case of the old making way for the new – neurons, that…
Ever since Leo Kanner wrote the first clinical description of early childhood autism in 1943, much of the material that has been written relates to parents and their experiences of having a child with…
As technology advances so does our ability to monitor unborn babies. Now it’s even possible to track how a very young fetus, still in its mother’s womb, learns and remembers basic speech. As a labour and…