the final march @neurophysicist - Tumblr Blog

lost-in-scalet

Untitled en We Heart It.

#Pedestrian predilections.

thiagodelyra-deactivated2016012

Frozen Ice Planet

#Brave new worlds.

fredscience-blog

The Doorway Effect: Why your brain won’t let you remember what you were doing before you came in here

I work in a lab, and the way our lab is set up, there are two adjacent rooms, connected by both an outer hallway and an inner doorway. I do most of my work on one side, but every time I walk over to the other side to grab a reagent or a box of tips, I completely forget what I was after. This leads to a lot of me standing with one hand on the freezer door and grumbling, “What the hell was I doing?” It got to where all I had to say was “Every damn time” and my labmate would laugh. Finally, when I explained to our new labmate why I was standing next to his bench with a glazed look in my eyes, he was able to shed some light. “Oh, yeah, that’s a well-documented phenomenon,” he said. “Doorways wipe your memory.”

Being the gung-ho new science blogger that I am, I decided to investigate. And it’s true! Well, doorways don’t literally wipe your memory. But they do encourage your brain to dump whatever it was working on before and get ready to do something new. In one study, participants played a video game in which they had to carry an object either across a room or into a new room. Then they were given a quiz. Participants who passed through a doorway had more trouble remembering what they were doing. It didn’t matter if the video game display was made smaller and less immersive, or if the participants performed the same task in an actual room—the results were similar. Returning to the room where they had begun the task didn’t help: even context didn’t serve to jog folks’ memories.

The researchers wrote that their results are consistent with what they call an “event model” of memory. They say the brain keeps some information ready to go at all times, but it can’t hold on to everything. So it takes advantage of what the researchers called an “event boundary,” like a doorway into a new room, to dump the old info and start over. Apparently my brain doesn’t care that my timer has seconds to go—if I have to go into the other room, I’m doing something new, and can’t remember that my previous task was antibody, idiot, you needed antibody.

Read more at Scientific American, or the original study.

#Occupational therapy.

neurosciencenews

Sorting Out Emotions

Read the full article Sorting Out Emotions at NeuroscienceNews.com.

Evaluating another person’s emotions based on facial expressions can sometimes be a complex task. As it turns out, this process isn’t so easy for the brain to sort out either.

The research is in PNAS. (full access paywall)

Research: “Neurons in the human amygdala selective for perceived emotion” by Shuo Wang, Oana Tudusciuc, Adam N. Mamelak, Ian B. Ross, Ralph Adolphs, and Ueli Rutishauser in PNAS. doi:10.1073/pnas.1323342111

Image: The team was able to record the responses from single neurons using existing electrodes, indicated by the arrows in the MRI image, placed in the brains of patients who were being treated for epilepsy. Credit Ralph Adolphs / Caltech.

#Occupational therapy.