DailyDirt: Growing Brains

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Wed, May 14th 2014 5:00pm — Leigh Beadon

There's little point waxing philosophical about the human brain — it's a near-miraculous mystery, and we all know it. Every study, at best, makes mere baby steps towards a fuller understanding of what's going on inside our skulls — and these three, focusing on how the brain develops and changes over time, are no different... and no less fascinating:

We don't form conscious memories as babies — but it seems we do form subconscious memories of faces. The study showed that kids at three-and-a-half years responded differently to the faces of people they'd met, even briefly, years prior. [url]
As young children we form clear, complex memories only to lose them a few years later — but why? Researchers can track the phenomenon of "childhood amnesia" as it happens from age three to about nine, but are still unsure of the exact cause. [url]
Our brains remain sharp and youthful until around age 24, when age-related decline begins. The study focused on cognitive motor performance, tested by pitting thousands of Starcraft 2 players against each other in comparative matches based on age and skill. [url]

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Filed Under: brains

10 Comments

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silverscarcat (profile), 14 May 2014 @ 4:43pm

Man...
I thought this was an article that had links to growing brains in labs somewhere and had a joke about zombie security.
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- G Thompson (profile), 14 May 2014 @ 8:52pm
  
  Re: Man...
  Me too.. Now I'm just annoyed that my dream of having a Zombie farm will never arrive ;(
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Sheogorath (profile), 14 May 2014 @ 5:12pm

The facts
Most people don't form conscious memories as babies � but it seems they do form subconscious memories of faces.
FTFY, Leigh. You see, I can remember a fair few things from before I was five, even a couple of events from when I was nine months old. Homo sapiens autistica has different disadvantages than Homo sapiens sapiens, and a lot of ours are created by a society that tries to mould us in its image.
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- Anonymous Coward, 15 May 2014 @ 1:04am
  
  Re: The facts
  9 months old?
  
  Are you sure that these aren't synthetic memories that are stored based on what your parents have told you?
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  - Sheogorath (profile), 23 May 2014 @ 12:27am
    
    Re: Re: The facts
    My mum couldn't have told me about me lying in my Silver Cross pram, batting at the blue and yellow duck rattles strung across the hood of it, because she was cooking in the kitchen while I was in the back garden, the pram facing away from the house. As I have stated, I can remember back to when I was around nine-months-old; not because of synthetic memories, but because I'm Autistic.
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Rekrul, 14 May 2014 @ 5:16pm

I'm not sure exactly how old I was, probably around two, but I have a very clear memory of playing with a plastic toy car in the kitchen of our first home when a grease fire briefly flared up on the stove as my mother was cooking. I even remember what the car looked like.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 May 2014 @ 5:43pm

Third story has a broken invalid link
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- Leigh Beadon (profile), 14 May 2014 @ 5:46pm
  
  Re:
  odd... it appears the CBC website doesn't play well with bitly. Link should be fixed now -- thanks for the heads up!
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Coyne Tibbets (profile), 14 May 2014 @ 8:51pm

Conscious memories
I think conscious memories require conscious attempt to organize the memory.

My earliest memory is placed by my mother, as best we can, at about 12-14 months. It is a memory of the sound of crickets at night, and I remember it (I think) because I also remember quite clearly imagining that the sound was caused by the turning of wheels; such as the wheels on my pull toy. (The toy made a chirping sound, you see.)
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Udom (profile), 15 May 2014 @ 7:40am

Memories
All memories are reconstructions, so the accuracy of any memory other than immediate is impossible to verify. What you see at any time is a construction, as your brain knits info from saccades together with the vague impressions the blurry areas outside saccade targets present. Memories are tagged with values, and those that are tagged as unimportant are deleted. When you're young everything is fascinating and important. As you get older less and less seems worthy of attention.
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