There was no apparent memory of the box or the contextual clues in the rats altered one day after the training session. Hippocampal damage seemed to have destroyed any recollection of the training session. But rats damaged four weeks after the pairing of stimuli responded just as well as others that had been trained but not damaged. When put back in the box and exposed to the tone, they crouched in the corner afraid.
Fanselow concludes that the hippocampus is involved in learning that requires integrating various stimuli, including the look, feel, and smell of the box, or various bits of an environment. Further, he believes that the hippocampus is necessary for short-term recall of such memories, but that with time, the memories are down-loaded to another part of the brain, perhaps the neighboring neocortex, for long-term storage.
Last fall, neuroscientists led by Larry Squire, Ph.D., of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Diego, produced the first pictures of human memory at work. Using positron emission tomography (PET), they confirmed that memory has no single location. Rather, bits of a memory are scattered all over the brain—possibly in the vast neocortex neighboring the areas in the hippocampus that first process the sensory input.
In remembering, the hippocampus acts like a telephone switchboard, activating the scattered cortical links. After awhile, the cortical areas learn to dial direct—they establish independent neural connections among themselves, and the switchboard can be bypassed. It is likely that the more stimuli the brain is given to process, the better the connections will be.
In other words, taking account of your surroundings and various other sensory clues will aid your recall. That may explain why some professors have long advocated studying in the same room where you will be tested. According to a new study, wearing the same scent during learning and recall may also up your scores. Psychologist David G. Smith, Ph.D., of Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Canada, found that ambient odor can act as a contextual cue for retrieval of verbal stimuli. He had 47 subjects learn a list of 24 words while either jasmine incense or Lauren perfume wafted through the air. Later, the subjects relearned the list with either the same or an alternative odor present. Memory for the word list was best when the odor of the relearning session was the same one present at the time of initial learning. Ammonia, chocolate, and peppermint scents have produced similarly good results.
Don't stop at smell. To improve performance, marshall all the senses, cognition experts urge. 'Create colorful, moving, three-dimensional mental images, complete with sound, rhythm, touch, and even scent to associate with the thing you want to remember,' says Ronald Gross, Ph.D., in Peak Learning (Tarcher, 1991). The more you use in the process of memorizing something, the better your recall will be.
2X3=6, 2X3=6, 2X3=6, 2X3=6, 2X3=6, 2X3=6, 2X3=6, 2X3=6, 2X3=6
Whether you want to master a physical skill such as throwing curveballs or a body of information like the names of all the vice presidents of the United States, there's no getting around it. You must first conquer the basics. Recent findings demonstrate that—because it reduces the energy demands on the brain—practicing the simple stuff makes the acquisition of later information more efficient.
UCLA neurologist John Mazziotta, M.D., photographed several living brains at work. First, using PET scans, he watched people perform a routine task—signing their name. He observed very little activity in the motor cortex, where signals are integrated, and a relatively small response in the basal ganglia, which sits just beneath the cortex and receives commands directly.
Mazziotta's subjects literally processed the task without much thought. No surprise there; after all, they'd been signing their names for decades.
Then he asked his subjects to create the same autograph with their nondominant hand. This time cortical structures—but not the subcortical basal ganglia—flashed on. The brain was hard pressed to process the request. It called on multiple circuits to make sense of the novel task. The brain eventually quieted after repeated scribbles with the nondominant hand. In fact, it transferred activity from the cortex back to the basal ganglia, where less space and energy were consumed.
This pattern, theorizes Mazziotta, represents learning. As we master a task, the total brain area required starts to shrink. More space is freed up to devote to other things. Moreover, with experience, processing shifts from brain regions that spend lots of energy integrating and supervising activity—the conscious cortex—to areas that are more automatic. In doing this, the more conscious structures are made available for new challenges.
That helps explain the much-touted advantage of Chinese children over American kids in math. University of Missouri psychologist David Geary challenged two groups of first graders with a slew of standard problems. He watched them and measured their response times.
Overall, the Chinese kids did better. They solved three times as many problems as did the Americans. Instead of counting on their fingers, they retrieved answers from memory. When they got stuck, they broke the problems into logical pieces—an achievement that requires conceptual understanding. This was clearly beyond the reach of the Americans.
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