A system with multiple transient memories can remember a set of inputs but subsequently forgets almost all of them, even as they are continually applied. If noise is added, the system can store all memories indefinitely. The phenomenon has recently been predicted for cyclically sheared non-Brownian suspensions. Here we present experiments on such suspensions, finding behavior consistent with mu...

For the last 40 years, researchers have collected cases of children who claim to remember previous lives. In a minority of these cases, the subjects also claim to remember events that took place during the intermission between the end of their previous life and their birth in the current life. Subjects in these cases tend to make more verified statements about the previous life they claim to re...

HOW DOES MEMORY WORK? It turns out that there is one brain structure that appears to be a ‘memory maker’. Without it, we cannot remember anything that has happened to us, even from only a few minutes ago, let alone from last summer. Indeed, there was a very famous case of a patient named Henry Molaison (often referred to as H.M.), who had damage to his brain and was completely unable to form ne...

hen I first met Semali, he was sitting behind his office computer wearing a white baseball cap and reading e-mail. An assistant professor of education at Penn State, Semali has two master's degrees from Stanford in communications and education, and a Ph.D. in social sciences and comparative education from UCLA – an education few would consider oppressive. But as I got to know him, I began to un...

Trauma memories – like all memories – are malleable and prone to distortion. Indeed, there is growing evidence – from both field and lab-based studies – to suggest that the memory distortion follows a particular pattern. People tend to remember more trauma than they experienced, and those who do, tend to exhibit more of the “re-experiencing” symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disord...

Memories are of the past but for the future, enabling individuals to implement intended plans and actions at the appropriate time. Prospective memory is the specific ability to remember and execute an intended behavior at some designated point in the future. Although sleep is well-known to benefit the consolidation of memories for past events, its role for prospective memory is still not well u...

A new study which combined associative memory tests with functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain has identified a potential neural correlate of the special association that is formed when an odor is first paired with a visual object. Odor memories in humans are likely to be processed by a separate memory system with distinctive features that make odor memories different from visual o...

It has been postulated that memories of near-death experiences (NDEs) could be (at least in part) reconstructions based on experiencers' (NDErs) previous knowledge and could be built as a result of the individual's attempt to interpret the confusing experience. From the point of view of the experiencer, NDE memories are perceived as being unrivalled memories due to its associated rich phenomeno...

Retrieving a memory is a reconstructive process in which encoded representations can be changed and distorted. This process sometimes leads to the generation of "false memories," that is, when people remember events that, in fact, never happened. Such false memories typically represent a kind of "gist" being extracted from single encountered events. The stress hormone cortisol is known to subst...