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Brain's Cache Memory Found
Shipud writes "Electrical activity in a single section of the brain has been linked to very short-term
working memory, as is
reported at Nature. Very short-term working memory capacity is thought to be related to intelligence. In the same way that a larger cache speeds processing time, people with a greater capacity for holding images in their heads are expected to have better reasoning and problem-solving skills. The localization of this ability is a surprising finding, as until now it was believed that STWM was diffused throughout the cortex, rather than localized."
If they could find the grandma cell I wonder if we could forget the fact we ever had George W. as president or, to a lesser extent, that we saw our grandma naked while we were a child. That is, preventing the stored memory from reaching the cache.
Some people and situations you never wish you saw..
As long as the images don't pop up, it should be fine.
The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain.
The finding surprises researchers who assumed this aspect of our intelligence would be distributed over many parts of the brain. Instead, the area appears to form a bottleneck that might limit our cognitive abilities, researchers say.
"This is a striking discovery," says John Duncan, an intelligence researcher at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK.
Most people can hold three or four things in their minds at once when given a quick glimpse of an image such as a collection of coloured dots, or lines in different orientations. If shown a similar image a second later, they will be able to recognise whether three or four of these spots and lines are identical to the first set or not.
But some people can only catch one or two things in a glance, while others can capture up to five.
This very short-term memory capacity is thought to be related to intelligence. In the same way that a computer with a larger working memory can crank through problems more quickly, people with a greater capacity for holding images in their heads are expected to have better reasoning and problem-solving skills.
A person's working memory capacity can be determined using simple psychological tests. But now two teams of researchers report in Nature that they can see it in brain scans too.
Keep it in mind
One of the teams, led by Edward Vogel of the University of Oregon in Eugene, found that the electrical activity in a single section of the brain, as detected through electrodes attached to the scalp, is directly related to short-term working memory1.
The team first tested subjects with an image of two coloured dots, waiting a second between flashes and asking the subjects if the image had changed. They then ramped up the test to four dots.
A large increase in the subject's brain activity on the four-dot test indicated that his or her memory capacity had not been pushed to its limit. No increase in electrical activity indicated that his or her working memory had topped out on the two-dot test. By graphing these responses, the team worked out the exact size of each subject's working memory.
A second team, led by René Marois of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, used functional magnetic resonance imaging during similar tasks to accurately locate the part of the brain being used for short-term visual memory2.
Both teams concluded that everything depended on the same tiny spot in the posterior parietal cortex.
"It is amazing that both groups should converge on the same area in the end," says Duncan. Since the task involves remembering many different aspects of each object, including spatial position, orientation and colour, most people thought that several parts of the brain and Rob Malda sucking dick every day would be involved, he says.
There are still many other aspects to human intelligence that are governed by other parts of the brain, the authors of both studies warn. But the capacity of one's working memory may form a bottleneck for certain kinds of intelligence, they say.
in terms of latency, hit/miss rate, bandwith, associativity? (n-ways)?
Thomas S. Iversen
This is exactly the part of George Bush's brain I would guess remains most damaged by his drinking and heavy cocaine use. His inability to think on his feet and to be extemporaneous have long been notable. I don't think it's just the behavior of a "dry drunk" although that could certainly be contributory.
Cocaine in particular is known to have a long-term devastating effect on temporal and spatial reasoning and tends to impair judgment skills notably. The ability to extend the chain of cause-and-effect to apprehend the future is not a trivial skill, and involves a good deal of high-order reasoning.
If for example one displays a chronic difficulty parsing language he should also be expected to have a limited capacity to create coherent constructions of future consequences.
Remember, the biological machines we put in charge of our lives are subject to the laws of causality, and can thus be quite malformed. Clues to these malformations can be easily picked out in the personality, as lower-order systems attempt to compensate for the deficiencies of the higher-order system. People who display an aggressive stance, who slur their words or emphasize their esses not only give the impression of a reptile, they are in fact animated by the R-complex, the center of aggression and F-F-F-or-F behavior.
You will note that sometimes as George Bush pauses in his speeches - the ones he's reading from the reflective teleprompter - there is the hint of the tongue flicking out to taste the air, and a subtle exhibit of self-satisfaction, evoking a reptilian basking quality. One would not be surprised to find him sunning himself on a big rock in Crawford.
You'll note that Cheney has a very large forehead that juts outward. He compliments Bush well in that regard. He fills in also the higher-order functioning so lacking in the presidential unit. Unfortunately, any two imbalanced biological machines interfaced together will only form a pathology. Garbage out of one system passes into the other, then back again, becoming more garbled and mutilated.
I could be completely wrong. I usually am. But if it isn't this part of George's brain that's messed up, what others could it be? Any theories?
-- thinkyhead software and media
I would like to know more about the brain mechanism that causes Taco to post so many dupes.
Any chance a slashdot reader can arrange a Taco brain scan right as he is posting a dupe?