Why Memory and Maths Don't Mix?????????

Can you compute your taxes while simultaneously remembering what you had for lunch yesterday? Neither can I. But doing two things at once isn’t always hard – in fact, it can be as easy as listening to music while driving, or talking or while cooking food.

Maths & Memory

 Stanford neuroscientist  Josef Parvizi, MD, PhD, and his colleagues have shown in a study that recalling your own experiences and performing externally oriented tasks such as arithmetical reasoning are mutually exclusive. That’s because the same brain circuitry that must be activated for the former to proceed must be actively suppressed during the latter activity. 

The researchers showed that groups of nerve cells in a structure called the posterior medial cortex, or PMC, are strongly activated during a recall task such as trying to remember whether you had coffee yesterday, but just as strongly suppressed when you’re engaged in solving a math problem.

The PMC sits roughly where the brain’s two hemispheres meet, making it one tough place to visit, technically speaking. Yet neuroscientists would love to learn much more about the PMC, because it’s known to be a key player in introspective activities such as remembering past experiences, imagining the future, and just plain daydreaming.

Many more research about this field is still on its way, we will keep updating it in our Shirsa blogs.  

- Team Shirsa

Want a Brain Like Einstein?

Baby Einstein

Everyone wishes he had a brain like Albert Einstein’s–but Thomas Harvey had the real thing.

An  NPR story  describes the incredible tale of Harvey, the pathologist who performed Einstein’s autopsy on April 18, 1955.  Fascinated by what accounted for Einstein’s genius, Harvey removed his brain, examined it, put it in a jar, and then brazenly left Princeton Hospital.

Harvey defended his actions by citing a duty to science–a duty he fulfilled by mailing bits of Einstein’s brain to neuroscientists around the country.

One lucky scientist who received a bit of Einstein’s brain in a mayonnaise jar was Marian Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley.  Previous research had shown that Einstein’s brain didn't have more neurons than normal, but Diamond hypothesized his brain had more of another type of brain cell called glial cells.  When she got the brain sample, she did indeed find more of two types of glial cells, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes.  

There was an especially high concentration of glial cells in a brain area involved in imagery and complex thinking. Most would agree that Einstein excelled at both.

In the 1980s, most scientists thought that glial cells were basically filler between neurons, which did all the brain’s heavy-lifting.  But in 1990, Stanford University researcher Stephen J. Smith made a significant discovery: glial cells could communicate and transmit chemical signals between neurons throughout the brain.  Lifted from their undeserved reputation as bottom-feeders of the brain, scientists began to recognize their role in learning and memory.

Researchers are  working hard to uncover more brain mysteries like this.  Luckily, as far as this intern knows, the team hasn’t resorted to stealing famous people’s brains… at least not yet…


- Team Shirsa