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…
Memory is an essential part of our existence. Who we are, what we know and what we think can all be derived from our ability to remember. How reliable, though, are our memories? A study, published in the…
I’m not old by any means, but I’ve become a little more forgetful lately. This morning I poured myself a thermos of coffee and left for lab, abandoning it on the kitchen counter. I nearly forgot about…
Snails, like all animals, need to remember – what is good or bad to eat, what might be trying to eat them, and who they recently mated with. All of these things can prove extremely important in the fight…
“Time is the thief of memory,” wrote Stephen King in one of his many books. For some people, however, that is not true. They are gifted with what scientists call highly superior autobiographical memory…