Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Older adults often find that their memories betray them. A team of Canadian psychologists, led by Michael Ross of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, offers this advice to elderly individuals with memory concerns: Don't go it alone.

Talking about recent memories with someone else, such as a spouse, works like a cognitive vacuum cleaner, in Ross' view. It sucks up many mistakes that litter memory, leaving behind a relatively clean core of accurately recalled

Louis J. Sheehan.  The stress of experiencing inadequate childhood care rebounds with a brain-altering, memory-sapping vengeance in middle age, at least in laboratory rats, a new study indicates.

Neuroscientist Tallie Z. Baram of the University of California, Irvine and her colleagues have obtained the first evidence that young animals exposed to such stress later in life suffer memory declines accompanied by disrupted cell communication in the hippocampus, a brain region critical for

Louis J. Sheehan.  People call on a rich background of relevant experiences to organize and remember new material. Rats do the same, and with surprising speed, say Dorothy Tse of the University of Edinburgh and her coworkers.  http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

Prior studies, which have focused on task learning unrelated to preexisting knowledge, indicate that a brain region called the hippocampus incorporates new facts and events into memory. The hippocampus gradually yields to