“For over a century, researchers have called for a unified accounting of this variability. However, one of the biggest challenges of studying memory is that people often remember the same things in different ways, making it difficult for researchers to compare people’s performances on memory tests,” said Dr. “Our memories play a fundamental role in who we are and how our brains work. Zaghloul’s team to learn more about the inner-workings of the brain. After spending many years studying how our mental states – our moods, our sleeping habits, and our familiarity with something – can change our memories, Dr. Xie got the idea for the study at a Christmas party which he attended shortly after his arrival at NIH about two years ago. “These results also provide the strongest evidence to date that what we discovered about how the brain controls memory in this set of patients may also be true for people outside of the study.”ĭr. “We saw that some things – in this case, words – may be inherently easier for our brains to recall than others,” said Dr. Also, it was hard to explain why words like “tank,” “doll,” and “pond” were remembered more often than frequently used words like “street,” “couch,” and “cloud.”īut any doubts were quickly diminished when the team saw very similar results after 2,623 healthy volunteers took an online version of the word pair test that the team posted on the crowdsourcing website Amazon Mechanical Turk. For many years scientists have thought that successful recall of a paired word meant that a person’s brain made a strong connection between the two words during learning and that a similar process may explain why some experiences are more memorable than others. Zaghloul and the team were surprised by the results and even a bit skeptical. In fact, of the 300 words used, the top five were on average about seven times more likely to be successfully recalled than the bottom five.Īt first, Dr. Xie and his colleagues re-examined the test results, they found that patients successfully recalled some words more often than others, regardless of the way the words were paired. Zaghloul’s team had used these tests to study how neural circuits in the brain store and replay memories. A few seconds later they were shown one of the words, for instance “hand,” and asked to remember its pair, “apple.” Dr. Patients were shown pairs of words, such as “hand” and “apple,” from a list of 300 common nouns. Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia often destroys the brain’s capacity to make these memories. The memory tests were originally designed to assess episodic memories, or the associations – the who, what, where and how details - we make with our past experiences. With the help of these patient volunteers we have been able to uncover some of the blueprints behind our memories.” “The monitoring period also provides a rare opportunity to record the neural activity that controls other parts of our lives. “Our goal is to find and eliminate the source of these harmful and debilitating seizures,” said Dr. During the observation period, patients spend several days at the NIH’s Clinical Center with surgically implanted electrodes designed to detect changes in brain activity. Zaghloul’s team tries to help patients whose seizures cannot be controlled by drugs, otherwise known as intractable epilepsy. Xie and his colleagues first spotted these words when they re-analyzed the results of memory tests taken by 30 epilepsy patients who were part of a clinical trial led by Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon and senior investigator at NINDS. “We hope that these results can be used as a roadmap to evaluate the health of a person’s memory and brain.”ĭr. Our results support the idea that our memories are wired into neural networks and that our brains search for these memories, just the way search engines track down information on the internet,” said Weizhen (Zane) Xie, Ph.D., a cognitive psychologist and post-doctoral fellow at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), who led the study published in Nature Human Behaviour. “We found that some words are much more memorable than others. In a recent study of epilepsy patients and healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers found that our brains may withdraw some common words, like “pig,” “tank,” and “door,” much more often than others, including “cat,” “street,” and “stair.” By combining memory tests, brain wave recordings, and surveys of billions of words published in books, news articles and internet encyclopedia pages, the researchers not only showed how our brains may recall words but also memories of our past experiences. Thousands of words, big and small, are crammed inside our memory banks just waiting to be swiftly withdrawn and strung into sentences. NIH study suggests our brains may use search engine strategies to remember words and memories of our past experiences.
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