New research published today by Cairney and his colleagues in Current Biology has made significant headway on this issue by linking sleep spindles—spontaneous bursts of brain activity—to memory processing in a sleeping brain. Incredibly, the researchers claim it is possible to determine the content of the memory being processed by analyzing this brain activity.
Source: vice.com
MIT researchers have come up with a new way to measure electrical activity in the brain. Their new light-sensitive protein can be embedded into neuron membranes, where it emits a fluorescent signal that indicates how much voltage a particular cell is experiencing. This could allow scientists to study how neurons behave, millisecond by millisecond, as the brain performs a particular function.
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Learning has an evolutionary purpose: Among species, individuals that adapt to their environments will succeed. That’s why your brain more easily retains important or surprising information: It takes very little effort to remember that the neighbor’s dog likes to bite. Remembering the dog’s name is harder.
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