Here’s a recent talk by Daphne Bauvelier (University of Rochester) on brain plasticity & video game playing. I’m not usually a huge TED fan, but this is actually a decent neuroscience one, it seems. Positive press from the online neuroscience community, too, which is neat. Hopefully such discussion fuels further research talk on the topic!

I gave a talk at Chicago State University yesterday, the inaugural Scheinbuks Lecture (honoring a new endowment that provides scholarships to outstanding students).  In the post-talk Q&A, I got a question about how to study better so that a student would have better performance on the upcoming test.  As a memory guy, I should really […]

I mentioned this recent study in lab meeting today and decided to collect a few details here.  I saw the NY Times report cited/linked in a couple of other places and it is a good start (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/science/bias-persists-against-women-of-science-a-study-says.html?ref=science&_r=0). Key paragraphs: To avoid such complications, the Yale researchers sought to design the simplest study possible. They contacted […]

We often speak colloquially about how cognitive (working memory) training is like a workout for your brain.  I think this analogy can be somewhat usefully pushed to illustrate underlying principles. For example, if one were to go to the gym and train on an upper body exercise (e.g., bench press), the muscle gains will be […]

George A. Miller just passed away.  Many people consider his 7 +/- 2 paper to be the first step in the “cognitive revolution” of the 60s in which Cognitive Psychology came to be a major principle of psychology (replacing behaviorism to some extent, at least until the emergence of behavioral neuroscience). However, his role in […]

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of my favorite bloggers. He is listed as the “senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine.” He writes about race better than anybody I have ever read. Plus we have some other areas of overlapping interest. Today he dug […]

I think there will likely be a clip of me talking briefly about the memory capacity of the human brain on BYU radio tomorrow (Wed, 6/20) in the morning (8:30/10:30?).  The host/producer said they’d try to get me a clip and I’ll link or post it if they do. We are also preparing a press […]

Walking in nature is good for your brain.  Why?  I’m not sure either, but that didn’t stop me from sharing a few ideas on this topic with a health and science reporter for the Medill News Service: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=206542 Someday when our never-ending series of studies on ego depletion and skill learning requires us to un-deplete […]

I’d been meaning to post something on this for awhile, forgot, then was recently reminded again.  This has to be a top candidate in the category of arbitrary and useless skills that people get ridiculously good at: Link if embed doesn’t work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyU5v0ZYMjI The point is not to make fun of this kind of skill […]

I haven’t been really random in awhile, but recently an editor of a science magazine asked me the curious question: how much learning is implicit? Because I like distant analogies, I’m strongly tempted to claim in response: Implicit learning is the dark matter of memory To ground the analogy, the idea is that what we […]