Human memory

Human memory: Performance linked to changes in brain structure and function

November 16, 2011 by Editor

At Neuroscience 2011, researchers at the University of California, Irvine and Charité University Medicine Berlinprovided insight into one of neuroscience‘s most intriguing mysteries: how the human brain learns and remembers. These studies — involving topics as diverse as musical memory, “change blindness,” and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) —  illustrate the profound influence that specific changes in either the brain‘s structure, function, or both, can have on human behavior.

Specifically, the studies showed that:

• Two brain regions associated with personal recollections and obsessive compulsive disorder are larger in individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory, a rare condition that allows people to remember nearly every event of their lives.
• A German cellist with severe amnesia not only performs normally on a standardized test for musical memory, he is also able to acquire new musical information. The finding suggests musical memories are stored differently than other memories in the brain./.../