MICRO-REVIEW: Meaning and Memory in Gesture

"Perhaps gestures contain meaning, displaying the mind at work or perhaps they help us produce speech more effectively. Either way gestures are not just useless by-products of some other process, but provide vital support for our communicative abilities..." more»

BOOK: The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers

Declarative memory -- about people, places, and things -- is highly fallible and susceptible to distortion and suggestion. This book provides a framework for understanding the memory miscues that occur in everyday life: absent-mindedness, transience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence... more»

STUDY: Body position affects memory for events

Turns out that holding your body in the right physical position seems to lead to faster, more accurate access to certain memories... more»

STUDY: How the brain makes memories that last a lifetime

In the formation of long-term memories, the brain apparently co-opts the same machinery by which cells stably alter their genes to specialize during embryonic development... more»

STUDY: A deficit in the ability to form new human memories without sleep

Ruh-roh! "An absence of prior sleep substantially compromises the neural and behavioral capacity for committing new experiences to memory"... more»

STUDY: Problem forgetting may be a natural neural mechanism gone awry

The increased rate of forgetting with age may be from a slight shift in a normal forgetting mechanism... more»