Word: brained
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...come in? Genetic influences account for a little less than half of the variation in personality within a given population. Some of the variation may be due to random biological processes: just as identical twins don't have exactly the same freckles, they don't have exactly the same brain. Some small amount may be due to socialization - for example, some cultures foster a more aggressive personality. The remainder depends on the experiences people have over the course of childhood and adolescence - experiences they have outside the home, often in the presence of their peers...
...used SenseCam, which has a wide-angle lens and takes impromptu rather than staged pictures, found their recall to be greatly enhanced. "This isn't rocket science and the device is quite simple but there's something about its spontaneous, wide-angle photographs that seem to mimic the brain's own episodic memory," says Emma Berry, a neuropsychologist working on the project. In the past few years, several studies conducted at the hospital have shown that, after reviewing the photographs for an hour every other day for two weeks, dementia patients are able to recall photographed activity months later - even...
...That's what we find so exciting. Their recall improved by up to 80%, not only when looking at the photos but months after studying the sequence. It raises the possibility of firing up parts of the brain that have become inactive because of the disease," Berry says...
...Humans store memories in various regions of the brain, but neuroscientists have pinpointed one section deep within, a seahorse-shaped structure called the hippocampus, as particularly crucial to memory. Studies of patients with brain injury or disease have shown that the hippocampus is where new memories are formed and where recent ones are retrieved; like a librarian, it scans the brain's catalog of bygone information and brings appropriate material to the fore. (But a recent brain-scan study of 15 healthy adults at the University of California, San Diego, found that the hippocampus has less to do with memories...
...Alzheimer's Society's Montgomery-Smith thinks singing sessions may work similarly, by dredging up distant memories associated with the music and stimulating memory-retrieval mechanisms in the brain. But many other Alzheimer's activists warn that putting too much hope in claims of so-called "hidden cognitive rehabilitation" will only distract from the urgent need to find a cure. "There are so many things that you can't overcome with Alzheimer's - we can't get too excited by these low-tech treatments. They can help patient care but they will never deliver a solution," says Susanne Sorensen, head...