People have terrific memories: new study
p2pnet news view | Off Topic:- People have amazing memories.
And that’s official.
In a study which ranks right up there with the one which concluded mice become alcoholics if you pump endless streams of alcohol into them, and another which found beagles develop chronic respiratory problems if you strap masks to their faces which force them to smoke cigarettes, “A new study found the brain can remember a lot more than previously believed,” says LiveScience.com.
It doesn’t say who’d previously believed what but, “In a recent experiment, people who viewed pictures of thousands of objects over five hours were able to remember astonishing details afterward about most of the objects,” it says, quoting a project funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, and a National Research Service Award.
“In the experiment, 14 people ranging from age 18 to 40 viewed nearly 3,000 images, one at a time, for three seconds each,” It says. “Afterwards, they were shown pairs of images and asked to select the exact image they had seen earlier.”
And guess what? Lots of people remembered lots of images and details associated with them.
So, “now that we know the brain’s memory is so fantastic, are we all out of excuses for forgetting friends’ birthdays?” wonders the story.
“Luckily not,” it has study leader Aude Oliva saying.
“To some extent it’s about attention, actively encoding specific details into memory,” he told LiveScience. “If we tried really hard we actually could remember when someone’s birthday was: if you say to yourself, ‘The birthday is on this day and that relates to these other things that I remember’.”
How much did the sponsoring organizations pump into this project?
The story doesn’t say.
Now you know. So don’t forget.
Los Angeles Times – xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, September , 2008
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September 9th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Minister Prentice and other politicians, take note!
September 9th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Yes, because it’s easier to internalise through association rather than repetition, at least in the short term.