A study conducted at the University of Montreal showed that young people who played the 1996 game Super Mario 64 for just two months had increased spatial and episodic memory, which improves brain capacity and helps to prevent dementia. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: Super Mario could help prevent dementia, scientists say (telegraph.co.uk)
The hippocampus (pictured) is a critical part of the brain for forming memories. It’s also one of the few brain regions where new neurons are continually generated – a process called neurogenesis. But the pool of stem cells giving rise to these new neurons is susceptible to the ageing process just like the rest of the body, and scientists have found that, with age, an increasing number of hippocampal stem cells enter a state of dormancy and dysfunction called senescence. By treating older mice with a drug that kills these decrepit stem cells, the remaining healthy ones were able to produce more new neurons (coloured red). Moreover, this enhanced neurogenesis was coupled with improved spatial memory in the treated animals. If similar hippocampal rejuvenation is deemed safe and effective in humans, it may help curb cognitive decline in older people and enable them to hold on to their memories for longer.
Written by Ruth Williams
Image from work by Michael P. Fatt and colleagues
Program in Neurosciences and Mental Health, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada
Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Research published in Stem Cell Reports, January 2022
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Chickadees with better learning and memory skills, needed to find numerous food caches, are more likely to survive their first winter, a long-term study of mountain chickadees has found.
Chickadees with better learning and memory skills, needed to find numerous food caches, are more likely to survive their first winter, a long-term study of mountain chickadees has found.
Enhanced spatial cognition and brain power evolves via natural selection, an elaborate study of hundreds of mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada has found. Using passive integrative transponder (PIT) tags in combination with radio frequency identification-equipped feeders, scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno have tracked feeding behaviors and measured learning and memory of these non-migratory birds that live year-round in the high-elevation forest northwest of Truckee, California.
"This is a unique program, set in the wilderness, so we get unique results," Vladimir Pravosudov, lead researcher and biology professor at the University's College of Science, said. "Over the years, we've banded and tagged thousands of chickadees and observed their spatial cognition using custom-designed and built feeders that allow us to track how individuals learn and remember. And now we have tested whether individuals with better learning and memory performance are more likely to survive the winter."
Ben Sonnenberg, a doctoral student in the laboratory of Pravosudov (as a part of the Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology Graduate program) is the lead author, and Pravosudov is a corresponding author, on a scientific paper, based on the research, published Feb. 7 in the journal Current Biology.
'We're looking at how natural selection can generate differences in the birds living in different environments, and we now have direct evidence that selection is acting on chickadees' spatial cognition, which is needed to find tens of thousands of previously made food caches required to survive the winter," Pravosudov said. "Our new evidence fully support our previous comparative studies showing that chickadees living in harsh winter conditions at high elevations have better memory and larger hippocampus, a brain structure associated with memory. Our new data show that better learning and memory in these birds at high elevations are due to strong natural selection."
Waiting rooms teach a particular sort of patience —
not hope, not resignation,
but suspension.
A state where identity loosens
and everyone becomes interchangeable
against glass, clouds, runways.
boxed in, bricked up, built to contain
the view is a metaphor
escape is not included in the floor plan
architecture doesn’t just contain people—
it hoards time
layers of memory laid like concrete
containers for when real memory fades
