shslneuroscientist

[shslneuroscientist]

Ask my character two personal questions. They will answer one.

[shslneuroscientist]

hey lets play how hot is that character

hey lets play how hot is that character

Not My Type | Alright | Cute | Adorable | Hot | Sexy | LORD MERCY

[shslneuroscientist]

List of Drabble Prompts

Scream: My character has caused yours to scream out for some reason

Graveyard: My character will visit your characters grave

Spectre: My character will be visited by your character’s ghost or vice versa

Dream: My character will have a dream about your character

Nightmare: One of our characters will have a nightmare.

Busted: Your character will catch mine doing something they shouldn’t.

Break Me: I will write an angsty drabble about our characters.

Comfort Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character comforting yours- vise versa.

Drink Me: I will write a drabble about my character taking shots with yours.

Dominate Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character dominating yours. Or vise versa.

Embarrass Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character saying or doing something embarrassing to himself or to your character.

Haunt Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character watching over yours [as a ghost, watching from a distance, or otherwise, feel free to specify.]

Hunt with me: I’ll write a drabble about your character and mine on a hunt together.

Join Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character giving your character an offer

Kill Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character killing yours.

Nurse Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character healing yours.

Raise Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character resurrecting yours. Vise versa.

Surprise Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character surprising yours. Vise versa.

Save Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character saving yours or vise versa.

Shoot Me: I’ll write a drabble about my character shooting yours or vise versa.

Torture Me: I’ll write a drabble about your character torturing mine or vise versa.

Deny Me: my character will either deny your character’s advances or deny them a ’ happy ending’

Lick Me: my character will lick yours in any specified place or manner.

Suck Me: my character will suck on any body part of your character

Tease Me: my character will tease yours, whether in a friendly or a sexual manner

Bite Me: my character will bite yours on any part of their body

Blindfold Me: my character will blindfold yours in order to have their fun

Meet Me: My character is meeting yours either for the first time or just causally.

Slap me: my character will slap yours. In the sexual manner, or of anger. specify.

Call Me: My character will call your character for whatever reason.

Hug Me: My character will hug yours. Either by surprise or for a specific reason.

Give Me: my character will give yours a gift

Sleep: My character needs to stay at your character’s house for the night, or vise versa. Specify.

Drink: My character will call, text, or show up at your character’s house drunk. Specify which of the three.

Heal: My character will tend to your character’s wounds, or be at their side when they’re sick.

Protect: My character keeps yours safe from harm.

Kiss: My character kisses yours, or vise versa. Specify.

Dream: My character wakes up in the middle of the night because of a dream with your character in it.

Revenge: My character will get revenge on yours.

Jealousy: My character gets jealous over yours.

Hallucinations: My character will have hallucinations about your character.

Candle: Our characters spending time together by candle light.

Gift: My character gives your character something special. Or vise versa. Specify.

Spell: I’ll write my character putting a spell on yours. Or being under a spell/curse.

Song: My charcter singing a song to yours, or vice versa.

Gloves: How my character deals with news from yours, Specify

Snow: Our characters in the cold together.

Rain: I’ll write a fluffy drabble of our characters kissing in the rain.

Kill: I’ll write a angst drabble of my character violently killing yours.

Love: I’ll write a drabble of my character admitting they love yours.

Lust: I’ll write a drabble of our characters making love together.

Date: I’ll write a drabble of my character taking yours out on a date.

Defend: I’ll write a drabble of my character protecting yours.

Fight: I’ll write a drabble of my character fighting with/against yours.

Trick: Your character and mine being sneaky together

Treat: Your character and mine being sweet to one another

Costume: Your character or mine, dressing up for the other

Stars: Our characters under the stars together

Snow: Our characters in the cold together

Scarf: Your character or Mine borrowing/stealing clothes from the other

Hot Cocoa: Our characters enjoying a hot moment together.

Candles: Our characters enjoying a moment by candlelight

Gift: Your character or mine, surprising the other with a present

Bows: Your character or mine, dressing/undressing the other

Peppermint: Your character or mine, sharing a sweet secret with the other.

[shslneuroscientist]

Roleplay Starters & Prompts

❂ -- It's incredibly hot outside and my muse is trying to persuade yours to go swimming together.

☁︎ -- A dream (or nightmare) about your muse.

❆ -- It's snowing and my muse slips on ice, accidentally crashing into your muse.

☯ -- My muse meets yours in a tranquil setting.

✆ -- A text message from my muse.

◎ -- It's raining and my muse finds yours outside completely drenched and crying.

☂ -- My muse encounters yours just as it starts to rain.

✑ -- Something my muse has written about your muse. ( Could be a letter, drawing, etc. )

↭ -- My muse is lost and stops to ask your muse for directions.

⌖ -- My muse's reaction to accidentally shooting your muse.

◌ -- Some of my muse's thoughts about your muse.

☉ -- My muse is undressing when your muse accidentally walks into the room.

✬ -- My muse conveys one of their wishes to you.

¤ -- In some turn of events, your muse ends up staying with mine.

❅ -- Our muses are trying to warm up after spending a day outside in the snow.

♪ -- My muse walks in on your muse singing to themselves.

❊❁ -- My muse gives yours some flowers.

❁ -- My muse's reaction to receiving a rose from your muse.

✧ -- A kiss from my muse to yours.

◎ -- My muse's reaction to being kissed by yours.

♡ -- A romantic gift from my muse.

[shslneuroscientist]

cyber bulling is real save volkswagen hayate

i thought his name was mitsubishi hayate?

[shslneuroscientist]

Sparklers continue to burn underwater

The sparklers keep burning because they contain an oxidizer (usualy Potassium nitrate or Potassium perchlorate) as a oxygen source instead of getting oxygen from the air. As a result, they are able to burn even when they are placed in an environment where oxygen is absent.

This experiment is potentially dangerous and even though we joke in the video I would not recommend any one repeat it at home.

Video source

[shslneuroscientist]

I WANT SUZUKI TO DRIVE

subaru hayate

[shslneuroscientist]

Another gif from my lab

In a brief break, we decided to have some fun by adding some manganese dioxide to hydrogen peroxide. The result is the ‘Genie in a bottle’ experiment, and steam (and heat) released from the decomposotion of hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide is not a very stable compound- it doesn’t take much to degrade it into oxygen (even light can do this).

[shslneuroscientist]

The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity. There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time. This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field.

Stephen Hawking declares: ‘There are no black holes’ | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

Please update your space lexicons pronto. Black Holes, to be filed next to Pluto is a Planet.

(via m1k3y)

[shslneuroscientist]

Trick yourself into an out-of-body experience

Your mind isn’t as firmly anchored in your body as you think. Time for some sleight of hand

CLOSE your eyes and ask yourself: where am I? Not geographically, but existentially. Most of the time, we would say that we are inside our bodies. After all, we peer out at the world from a unique, first-person perspective within our heads – and we take it for granted.

We wouldn’t be so sanguine if we knew that this feeling of inhabiting a body is something the brain is constantly constructing. But the fact that we live inside our bodies doesn’t mean that our sense of self is confined to its borders – as these next examples show.

Sleight of (rubber) hand

By staging experiments that manipulate the senses, we can explore how the brain draws – and redraws – the contours of where our selves reside.

One of the simplest ways to see this in action is via an experiment that’s now part of neuroscience folklore: the rubber hand illusion. The set up is simple: a person’s hand is hidden from their view by a screen while a rubber hand is placed on the table in front of them. By stroking their hand while they see the rubber hand being stroked, you can make them feel that the fake hand is theirs (see diagram).

Why does this happen? The brain integrates various senses to create aspects of our bodily self. In the rubber hand illusion, the brain is processing touch, vision and proprioception – the internal sense of the relative location of our body parts. Given the conflicting information, the brain resolves it by taking ownership of the rubber hand.

The implication is that the boundaries of the self sketched out by the brain can easily expand to include a foreign object. And the self’s peculiar meanderings outside the body don’t end there.

Trading places

Ever wish you had someone else’s body? The brain can make it happen. To show how, Henrik Ehrsson at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues transported people out of their own bodies and into a life-size mannequin.

The mannequin had cameras for eyes, and whatever it was “seeing” was fed into a head-mounted display worn by a volunteer. In this case, the mannequin’s gaze was pointed down at its abdomen. When the researchers stroked the abdomens of both the volunteer and the mannequin at the same time, many identified with the mannequin’s body as if it was their own.

In 2011, the team repeated the experiment, but this time while monitoring the brain activity of volunteers lying in an fMRI scanner. They found that activity in certain areas of the frontal and parietal lobes correlated with the changing sense of body ownership.

So what’s happening? Studies of macaque monkeys show us that these brain regions contain neurons that integrate vision, touch and proprioception. Ehrsson thinks that in the human brain such neurons fire only when there are synchronous touches and visual sensations in the immediate space around the body, suggesting that they play a role in constructing our sense of body ownership. Mess with the information the brain receives, and you can mess with this feeling of body ownership.

Yet while Ehrsson’s study manipulated body ownership, the person “inside” the mannequin still had a first-person perspective – their self was still located within a body, even if it wasn’t their own. Could it be possible to wander somewhere where there is no body at all?

Into thin air

Your self even can be tricked into hovering in mid-air outside the body. In 2011, Olaf Blanke at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne and colleagues asked volunteers to lie on their backs and via a headset watch a video of a person of similar appearance being stroked on the back. Meanwhile, a robotic arm installed within the bed stroked the volunteer’s back in the same way.

The experience that people described was significantly more immersive than simply watching a movie of someone else’s body. Volunteers felt they were floating above their own body, and a few experienced a particularly strange effect. Despite the fact that they were all lying facing upwards, some felt they were floating face down so they could watch their own back (see “Leaving the body”). “I was looking at my own body from above,” said one participant. “The perception of being apart from my own body was a bit weak but still there.”

"That was for us really exciting, because it gets really close to the classical out-of-body experience of looking down at your own body," says team member Bigna Lenggenhager, now at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Further support came by repeating the experiment inside an MRI scanner, which showed a brain region called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) behaving differently when people said they were drifting outside their bodies. This ties in neatly with previous studies of brain lesions in people who reported out-of-body experiences, which also implicated the TPJ.

The TPJ shares a common trait with other brain regions that researchers believe are associated with body illusions: it helps to integrate visual, tactile and proprioceptive senses with the signals from the inner ear that give us our sense of balance and spatial orientation. This provides more evidence that the brain’s ability to integrate various sensory stimuli plays a key role in locating the self in the body.

According to philosopher Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, understanding how the brain performs this trick is the first step to understanding how the brain puts together our autobiographical self – the sense we have of ourselves as entities that exist from a remembered past to an imagined future. “These experiments are very telling, because they manipulate low-level dimensions of the self: self-location and self-identification,” he says. The feeling of owning and being in a body is perhaps the most basic facet of self-consciousness, and so could be the foundation on which more complex aspects of the self are built. The body, it seems, begets the self.

[shslneuroscientist]

The science behind meditation, and why it makes you feel better

Meditation yields a surprising number of health benefits, including stress reduction, improved attention, better memory, and even increased creativity and feelings of compassion. But how can something as simple as focusing on a single object produce such dramatic results? Here’s what the growing body of scientific evidence is telling us about meditation and how it can change the way our brains function.

Before we get started it’s worth doing a quick review of what is actually meant by meditation. The practice can take on many different forms, but the one technique that appears most beneficial, and which also happens to be among the most traditional, is called mindfulness meditation, or focused attention.

By mindfulness, practitioners are asked to focus their thoughts on one thought and one thought alone. An overarching goal is to be firmly affixed to the present moment. This typically means concentrating on the breath — observing each inhalation and exhalation — and without consideration to other thoughts. When a “stray” thought arises, the practitioner must be quick to recognize it, and then turn back to the focus of their attention. And it doesn’t just have to be the breath; any single thought, like a mantra, will do.

Now, if you’ve ever tried it, you know how unbelievably difficult this is — particularly in this day in age when our attention spans are taxed to the limit. Our minds are notorious at wandering and moving from thought-to-thought; it’s hard sometimes to string just a few seconds of focused attention together.

And indeed, notions that meditation is simply about relaxation or cleansing the mind of allthoughts are common misconceptions. Meditation is hard work and it takes a lot of practice to get better. The more you do it, the easier it becomes to stay focused. Progress can be measured by how long a single thought can be focused upon without straying.

Remarkably, for something so exceedingly simple, it can produce an astounding number of health benefits. Eager to learn more, a growing number of scientists are looking into the cognitive effects of meditation, including studies on Buddhist monks. And they’re learning that meditation is a very powerful tool indeed.

As a quick aside, most of the studies cited here consider the benefits of focused attention. That’s not to suggest that other practices, like open attention, can’t yield positive results as well.

Changes to the Brain

Buddhists have meditated for literally thousands of years. They’re familiar with its positive effects, including the way it works to instill the inner strength and insight required for the overarching spiritual practice; meditation, or “sitting,” is to Buddhist monks what prayer is to Christians. But instead of trying to hack into the mind of God, Buddhists are trying to hack into their own mind to harness it under control.

But it has only been in recent times that neuroscientists have been able to peer directly into the brain to see what’s going on. The advent of fMRIs and other brain scanning techniques have largely paved the way.

For example, neuroscientists observing MRI scans have learned that meditation strengthens the brain by reinforcing the connections between brain cells. A 2012 study showed that people who meditate exhibit higher levels of gyrification — the “folding” of the cerebral cortex as a result of growth, which in turn may allow the brain to process information faster. Though the research did not prove this directly, scientists suspect that gyrification is responsible for making the brain better at processing information, making decisions, forming memories, and improving attention.

Indeed, as much of the research is showing, meditation causes the brain to undergo physical changes, many of which are beneficial. Other studies, for example, have shown that meditation is linked to cortical thickness, which can result in decreased sensitivity to pain.

Or take the 2009 study with the descriptive title, “Long-term meditation is associated with increased gray matter density in the brain stem.” Neuroscientists used MRIs to compare the brains of meditators with non-meditators. The structural differences observed led the scientists to speculate that certain benefits, like improved cognitive, emotional, and immune responses, can be tied to this growth and its positive effects on breathing and heart rate (cardiorespiratory control).

The integrity of gray matter, which is a major player in the central nervous system, certainly appears to benefit. Meditation has been linked to larger hippocampal and frontal volumes of gray matter, resulting in more positive emotions, the retention of emotional stability, and more mindful behavior (heightened focus during day-to-day living). Meditation has also been shown to have neuroprotective attributes; it can diminish age-related effects on gray matter and reduce cognitive decline.

A study from earlier this year showed that meditators have a different expression of brain metabolites than healthy non-meditators, specifically those metabolites linked to anxiety and depression.

But it’s not just the physical and chemical components of the brain that’s affected by meditation. Neuroscientists have documented the way it impacts on brain activity itself. For example, meditation has been associated with decreased activity in default mode network activity and connectivity — those undesirable brain functions responsible for lapses of attention and disorders such as anxiety, ADHD — and even the buildup of beta amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s disease.

And finally, meditation has been linked to dramatic changes in electrical brain activity, namely increased Theta and Alpha EEG activity, which is associated with wakeful and relaxed attention.

Health Benefits

While most of the studies listed above addressed the neuro-cognitive aspects of meditation, other studies have correlated meditation with many of the health benefits already described.

Perhaps the most significant benefit of meditation is its ability to improve attention. In 2010, researchers looked at participants who practiced focused attention meditation for about five hours each day over the course of three months (which is a lot!). After conducting concentration tests, the participants were shown to have an easier time sustaining voluntary attention. Which makes sense; if you can concentrate for extended periods of time during meditation, it should carry over to daily life. Focused attention is very much like a muscle, one that needs to be strengthened through exercise.

As an aside, five hours of meditation per day is a bit excessive. Other studies show that 20 minutes a day is all that’s required to get beneficial results, like stress reduction.

Indeed, other research has shown that even a little bit of meditation can help. Studies indicate that, after 10 intensive days of meditation (pdf), people can experience significant improvements in mindfulness and contemplative thoughts, the alleviation of depressive symptoms, and boosts to working memory and sustained attention.

A not-so-surprising study from last year showed that meditation can significantly reduce stress after just eight weeks of training (pdf; more here). Participants who meditated, as compared to those who did not, performed better on stressful multitasking tests. This may have something to do with reduced levels of cortisol, which is a stress hormone. And interestingly, meditatingbefore a stressful situation may help reduce feelings of stress during the event.

For you creative types, open-monitoring (OM) meditation can promote idea generation. OM meditation is basically the polar opposite of focused attention meditation, requiring practitioners to non-reactively monitor the content of experience from moment to moment.

And lastly, meditation has also been shown to increase levels of empathy, but it has to come from a specific practice known as loving-kindness-compassion meditation. It’s a kind of focused attention meditation, but the practitioner is asked to concentrate on feelings of love, compassion, and understanding. By comparing fMRI scans of novices to those of expert Buddhist monks (each with more than 10,000 hours of practice), researchers watched as emotional stimuli (sounds of people in distress) caused those areas of the brain linked to empathy light up; the monks exhibited greater degrees of empathetic response than the novices. In turn, the scientists speculate that compassion meditation can make a person more empathetic.

So what are you waiting for? Start sitting, and transform your brain!

Image: “Theologue” by Alex Grey.

[shslneuroscientist]

Photograph by Abbas Hajimohammadi Saniabadi

The first time Abbas Hajimohammadi Saniabadi visited a hospital in Tehran, where patients suffer from mental disorders like schizophrenia, he had one question for the head doctor: Can I come back?

It was mid-2012 and he wanted to document what life was like there for the hundreds of men and women being treated. The doctor eventually agreed. Hajimohammadi Saniabadi, now 30, traded in his old-model Nikon and sold his car, a Hyundai, to buy a Nikon D700 and get started on what would become his first story. He and the doctor set up four quick visits — but by year’s end, he would make nearly a dozen more. —Andrew Katz

See More Photos on LightBox — Fragile Minds: A Poignant Look Inside an Iranian Mental Hospital

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Coffee may boost brain’s ability to store long-term memories

A cup or two of coffee could boost the brain’s ability to store long-term memories, researchers in the US claim. People who had a shot of caffeine after looking at a series of pictures were better at distinguishing them from similar images in tests the next day, the scientists found.

The task gives a measure of how precisely information is stored in the brain, which helps with a process called pattern separation which can be crucial in everyday situations.

If the effect is real, and some scientists are doubtful, then it would add memory enhancement to the growing list of benefits that moderate caffeine consumption seems to provide.

Michael Yassa, a neuroscientist who led the study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said the ability to separate patterns was vital for discriminating between similar scenarios and experiences in life.

"If you park in the same parking lot every day, the spot you choose can look the same as many others. But when you go and look for your car, you need to look for where you parked it today, not where you parked it yesterday," he said.

Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Yassa described how 44 volunteers who were not heavy caffeine consumers and had abstained for at least a day were shown a rapid sequence of pictures on a computer screen. The pictures included a huge range of items, such as a hammer, a chair, an apple, a seahorse, a rubber duck and a car.

When each image flashed up on the screen, the person watching had to say whether the object was normally found indoors or outside, but they were not asked to memorise the pictures. At the end of the task, each volunteer was randomly assigned either a 200mg caffeine pill or a placebo. A typical cup of coffee contains around 150mg of caffeine.

The next day, the scientists brought the volunteers back and sat them down at the computer again. This time, the sequence of images included many they had seen the day before, but some were new and others were similar. The similar images varied in how close to the originals they were. Some showed the same object from a different angle, while others were a similar type of object, such as a different design of hammer from the one they had seen before.

For this part of the study, the volunteers had to say whether each image was either new, old or similar to one they had seen the day before. According to Yassa, the caffeine and placebo groups scored the same except when it came to spotting the similar images. In this task, the caffeine group scored around 10% higher, he said.

"What I’ve taken from this is that I should keep drinking my coffee," Yassa told the Guardian. "Our study suggests there’s a real learning and memory benefit, but other studies suggest caffeine is associated with increased longevity, and a resistance to Alzheimer’s disease. In moderate amounts, it could have beneficial effects for health."

Yassa said it was unclear how caffeine might help the storage of memories, but one theory is that it leads to higher levels of a stress hormone called norepinephrine in the brain, which helps memories to be laid down.

Some scientists, however, say they need more evidence to believe the effect. George Kemenes, a neuroscientist who studies memory at Sussex University, said the statistical techniques used in the paper were not good enough to prove the effect was real. “I have reservations. If the statistics aren’t right the whole story, beautiful as it is, unravels,” he said.

"Even if this was solidly true, which in my view it isn’t, it wouldn’t prove that caffeine has a memory-enhancing property. It wouldn’t call this an improvement in long-term memory."

Jon Simons, who works on memory at Cambridge University, said the study was interesting and carefully designed, but the effect needed to be shown in a larger number of people. “The claim that caffeine affects the consolidation of memories is based on quite a small effect that would really benefit from replication in a larger sample to be convincing,” he said.

[shslneuroscientist]

How Memory Works

by Online Colleges

[shslneuroscientist]

Gorgeous papercraft by Estonian artist Eiko Ojala for a New York Times article on how sleep serves as the brain’s janitor:

A series of new studies … may at last be shedding light on just what it is that would be important enough. Sleep, it turns out, may play a crucial role in our brain’s physiological maintenance. As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking.

Nothing new, of course, since we already know that REM sleep helps us regulate the negative emotions that accumulate during our waking hours, but there’s more. And yet, the NYT article continues, this is cause for alarm:

Modern society is increasingly ill equipped to provide our brains with the requisite cleaning time. The figures are stark. Some 80 percent of working adults suffer to some extent from sleep deprivation. According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults should sleep seven to nine hours. On average, we’re getting one to two hours less sleep a night than we did 50 to 100 years ago and 38 minutes less on weeknights than we did as little as 10 years ago. Between 50 and 70 million people in the United States suffer from some form of chronic sleep disorder. When our sleep is disturbed, whatever the cause, our cleaning system breaks down. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology, Sigrid Veasey has been focusing on precisely how restless nights disturb the brain’s normal metabolism. What happens to our cognitive function when the trash piles up?

At the extreme end, the result could be the acceleration of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. 

[…]

It’s a pernicious cycle. We work longer hours, become more stressed, sleep less, impair our brain’s ability to clean up after all that hard work, and become even less able to sleep soundly.

No wonder we suffer from “social jet lag.” And yet:

There is, however, reason to hope. If the main function of sleep is to take out our neural trash, that insight could eventually enable a new understanding of both neurodegenerative diseases and regular, age-related cognitive decline. By developing a diagnostic test to measure how well the glymphatic system functions, we could move one step closer to predicting someone’s risk of developing conditions like Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia: The faster the fluids clear the decks, the more effectively the brain’s metabolism is functioning.

Pair the full article with this excellent read on the science of our internal time, then see what happens while you sleep and how it affects your every waking moment.

[shslneuroscientist]

Younger people have “high definition” memories

It’s not that younger people are able to remember more than older people. Their memories seem better because they are able to retrieve them in higher definition. So says Philip Ko of Vanderbilt University in the US, in a study that sheds light on how differences in the behavioral and neural activity of younger and older adults influence the different generations’ ability to store and recall memories. The findings appear in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, published by Springer.

Under the mentorship of Dr. Brandon Ally, Ko led the research team to focus on visual working memory, a person’s ability to briefly retain a limited amount of visual information in the absence of visual stimuli. Their examination of why this function is reduced during the course of healthy aging took the multiple stages of encoding, maintenance, and the retrieval of memorized information into account.

They ran 11 older adults of around 67 years of age and 13 younger adults of approximately 23 years of age through a task called ‘visual change detection.’ This task consisted of viewing two, three or four colored dots and memorizing their appearance. These dots disappeared, and then after a few seconds the participants were presented with a single dot appearing in one of the memorized colors or a new color. The accuracy of their response (‘same’ or ‘different’) was considered to reflect how well they memorized the colors. This accuracy of response is referred to as ‘behavioral measure.’ Electroencephalographic data was also collected from the participants as they performed the task for a neural measure of their memory capacity.

Dr. Ko found that while behavioral measures indicated a lower capacity in older adults than younger adults to memorize items, the neural measure of memory capacity was very similar in both groups. In other words, during the maintenance stage, both groups stored the same number of items. The study is the first to show that the behavioral and electrophysiological correlates in the working memory capacity of older adults can be dissociated.

The researchers suggest, however, that older adults store the items at a lower resolution than younger adults, resulting in impaired recollection. The consequence of these differences in resolution may be apparent during retrieval from visual working memory. Unlike older adults, younger adults may be able to use perceptual implicit memory, a different kind of visual memory, to give them a ‘boost’ when they are trying to retrieve the stored information.

“We don’t know why older adults perform poorly when their neural activity suggests their memory capacity is intact, but we have two leads,” Ko said. “First, further analysis of this current dataset and other studies from our laboratory suggest that older adults retrieve memories differently than younger adults. Second, there is emerging evidence from other labs suggesting that the quality of older adults’ memories is poorer than younger adults. In other words, while older adults might store the same number of items, their memory of each item is ‘fuzzier’ than that of younger adults.”

[shslneuroscientist]