NewsCloud.com Memory News

Book Review: The Woman Who Can't Forget

With eight months left in 2008, it might be premature to choose the weirdest book of the year, but "The Woman Who Can't Forget," the memoir of a 42-year-old California woman named Jill Price, will be hard to beat. It poses a thought-provoking question-what would it be like to recall almost every day of your life since childhood?

Harvard Prof Says Computers Need to Forget

"A Harvard professor argues that too much information is being retained by computers, and the machines need to learn how to forget things as humans always have. "If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves," he writes in the paper. "Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely

Deja Vu, Again and Again

Understanding memory through the unusual syndrome of deja vecu. Episodic memories (deja vu) consist of two aspects: the information content, or "memory trace," and an accompanying experience of recollection. It's that experience, a little bit of consciousness attached to a memory, that lets us know that we are calling up something from the past. If someone experienced that feeling constantly, without any memory trace attached, they would feel as if they were "remembering the present." In other words, deja vecu.

Memory aided by meaning

Neuroscientists have discovered that how successfully you form memories depends on your frame of mind not just during and after the event in question, but also before it.