Better Memory May Not Be Out of Reach

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Don't let people with exceptional memories give you an inferiority complex. People who have especially good memories are not necessarily smarter than everyone else, researchers have found. They may just make better use of their brains than most people do.

The good news, according to the study's lead author, is that the rest of us may be able to learn a trick or two from people who can remember just about everything.

"Our research so far suggests that we might all have the potential and neural capacity to improve our memory," Dr. Eleanor A. Maguire told Reuters Health.

In the study, Maguire, who is a researcher at the University College London in the UK, and her colleagues evaluated the brains of 10 people with extraordinary memories, most of whom were participants in the World Memory Championships. For comparison, the study also included 10 people with normal memory.

People with superior memory did not differ from normal folks in two important ways, according to a report in the advance online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience. They were not any smarter. Both groups had "high-average" intelligence. In addition, there were no structural differences between the brains of the two groups.

The difference between the groups turned out to be in what parts of the brain they used to remember things. During a memory test, several brain regions were activated in both groups, but these areas were most active in the people with very good memories. Several other parts of the brain, including a few areas that are known to be involved in memory, were active only in people with the best recall abilities.

Almost all of the top-memory group used a mnemonic--a device or strategy for boosting memory--that involved visualizing items that need to be remembered as things on a path. To remember the items, a person "walks" down this path to the location of the item. The researchers suspect that the use of this memory tool activated the hippocampus, a part of the brain that is involved in spatial memory and was activated in people with excellent memories.

"Strategies to help us remember have been around for a long time, but very little is known about how they work at the level of the brain," Maguire said. The study shows that these strategies may be worthwhile, since they "clearly engage key memory areas in the brain," she said.

Studying the brain's activity as a person uses memory strategies could help people recover from memory loss, according to Maguire. For instance, she said that if a person has an injury in one part of the brain, it may be possible to improve memory by using memory strategies that rely on uninjured parts of the brain.

SOURCE: Nature Neuroscience 2002;10.1038/nn988.

Reference Source 89

For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
PreventDisease.com's "Quick Prevention Resources".