Attention to the Unseen

Diana Kwon writes: For the longest time the cerebellum, a dense, fist-size formation located at the base of the brain, never got much respect from neuroscientists. For about two centuries the scientific community believed the cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”), which contains approximately half of the brain’s neurons, was dedicated solely to the control of movement. In recent decades, however, the tide has started to turn, as researchers have revealed details of the structure’s role in cognition, emotional processing and…

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Jordana Cepelewicz writes: We humans have always experienced an odd — and oddly deep — connection between the mental worlds and physical worlds we inhabit, especially when it comes to memory. We’re good at remembering landmarks and settings, and if we give our memories a location for context, hanging on to them becomes easier. To remember long speeches, ancient Greek and Roman orators imagined wandering through “memory palaces” full of reminders. Modern memory contest champions still use that technique to…

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Adithya Rajagopalan writes: The first pieces of the brain’s “inner GPS” started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London, John O’Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky recorded the electrical activity of neurons in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. They found a group of neurons that increased their activity only when a rat found itself in a particular location. They called them “place cells.” Building on these early findings, O’Keefe and his colleague Lynn Nadel…

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Science News reports: Just a generation ago, common wisdom held that once a person reaches adulthood, the brain stops producing new nerve cells. Scientists countered that depressing prospect 20 years ago with signs that a grown-up brain can in fact replenish itself. The implications were huge: Maybe that process would offer a way to fight disorders such as depression and Alzheimer’s disease. This year, though, several pieces of contradictory evidence surfaced and a heated debate once again flared up. Today,…

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Emily Singer writes: Our brains have an extraordinary ability to monitor time. A driver can judge just how much time is left to run a yellow light; a dancer can keep a beat down to the millisecond. But exactly how the brain tracks time is still a mystery. Researchers have defined the brain areas involved in movement, memory, color vision and other functions, but not the ones that monitor time. Indeed, our neural timekeeper has proved so elusive that most…

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Steven Novella writes: Have you ever been in a semi-familiar location but couldn’t quite place where you were, then suddenly the landmarks line up and you know where you are? This might happen when entering a familiar location from an unusual direction, for example. Also (a seemingly unrelated question), when you visualize abstract ideas, do you arrange them physically. For example, do you visualize time (like days, weeks, months, years), and if so is there a particular physical relationship by…

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Like the day’s newspaper, the brain has a temporary way to keep track of events. TonTonic/Shutterstock.com By Kelsey Tyssowski, Harvard University The first dance at my wedding lasted exactly four minutes and 52 seconds, but I’ll probably remember it for decades. Neuroscientists still don’t entirely understand this: How was my brain able to translate this less-than-five-minute experience into a lifelong memory? Part of the puzzle is that there’s a gap between experience and memory: our experiences are fleeting, but it…

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Dalmeet Singh Chawla writes: Past theories about forgetting mostly emphasized relatively passive processes in which the loss of memories was a consequence of the physical traces of those memories (what some researchers refer to as “engrams”) naturally breaking down or becoming harder to access; those engrams may typically be interconnections between brain cells that prompt them to fire in a certain way. This forgetting process could involve the spontaneous decay of connections between neurons that encode a memory, the random…

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