#spatial memory

I just want to go. I just want to leave. I want the smell of a new place.

The city presents itself from the water as if distance alone could make it coherent. Departure. Transit. Waiting rooms. Ferries. Airports.

I just want to go. I just want to leave. I want the smell of a new place. (Photo: d.)

A study conducted at the University of Montreal showed that young people who played the 1996 game Super Mario 64 for just two months had increased spatial and episodic memory, which improves brain capacity and helps to prevent dementia. – WTF Fun Facts

Memory Makeover

The hippocampus (pictured) is a critical part of the brain for forming memories. It’s also one of the few brain regions where new neurons are continually generated – a process called neurogenesis. But the pool of stem cells giving rise to these new neurons is susceptible to the ageing process just like the rest of the body, and scientists have found that, with age, an increasing number of hippocampal stem cells enter a state of dormancy and dysfunction called senescence. By treating older mice with a drug that kills these decrepit stem cells, the remaining healthy ones were able to produce more new neurons (coloured red). Moreover, this enhanced neurogenesis was coupled with improved spatial memory in the treated animals. If similar hippocampal rejuvenation is deemed safe and effective in humans, it may help curb cognitive decline in older people and enable them to hold on to their memories for longer.

Written by Ruth Williams

Image from work by Michael P. Fatt and colleagues

Program in Neurosciences and Mental Health, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Research published in Stem Cell Reports, January 2022

Chickadees with better learning and memory skills, needed to find numerous food caches, are more likely to survive their first winter, a long-term study of mountain chickadees has found.

Enhanced spatial cognition and brain power evolves via natural selection, an elaborate study of hundreds of mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada has found. Using passive integrative transponder (PIT) tags in combination with radio frequency identification-equipped feeders, scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno have tracked feeding behaviors and measured learning and memory of these non-migratory birds that live year-round in the high-elevation forest northwest of Truckee, California.

"This is a unique program, set in the wilderness, so we get unique results," Vladimir Pravosudov, lead researcher and biology professor at the University's College of Science, said. "Over the years, we've banded and tagged thousands of chickadees and observed their spatial cognition using custom-designed and built feeders that allow us to track how individuals learn and remember. And now we have tested whether individuals with better learning and memory performance are more likely to survive the winter."

Ben Sonnenberg, a doctoral student in the laboratory of Pravosudov (as a part of the Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology Graduate program) is the lead author, and Pravosudov is a corresponding author, on a scientific paper, based on the research, published Feb. 7 in the journal Current Biology.

How the Brain's Grid System Maps Mental Spaces

Researchers have been able to demonstrate, with electrophysiological evidence, the existence of grid-like activity in the human brain.

Waiting rooms teach a particular sort of patience — not hope, not resignation, but suspension. A state where identity loosens and everyone becomes interchangeable against glass, clouds, runways.

(Photo: d.)

boxed in, bricked up, built to contain the view is a metaphor escape is not included in the floor plan architecture doesn’t just contain people— it hoards time layers of memory laid like concrete containers for when real memory fades

(Photo: d.)