Can you recall when the Boxer Rebellion occurred but forget where you left your car keys? Do you remember the name of the 13th president but have a hard time bringing a specific word to mind when you need it? You may be suffering from too much memory.

Research at the Columbia University Medical Center indicates that the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus, the part of the brain where learning and memory are seated, can actually cause you to experience more limited working, or short-term, memory.

Apparently, forgetting some information is essential to being able to access short-term memory. Storing too much information interferes with working memory. In experiments in which mice had the neurogenesis in the hippocampus blocked, they were better able to navigate a maze and locate food in the maze.

The researchers suggest that forgetting some older and useless information makes room for newer and useful information such as where your car is parked in a large lot.

But which information is useless, and is all older information just taking up storage space you could use for something newer and more immediate? It is said of Albert Einstein that he was often distracted and forgetful. He described his wild hairstyle as simply the result of doing nothing with it. But the man who reportedly never untied his shoes because he couldn’t remember to tie them again, was busy pondering the nature of the universe.

According to The Association for Distracted People, “distractedness actually reflects a high level of concentration (on something else)”.

If you have trouble with math and numbers, you can blame your right parietal lobe.

People with dyscalculia have difficulty processing numbers. Now researchers can identify the cause of dyscalculia, which is said to affect 5% of the population.

Scientists have traced the roots of dyscalculia (difficulty with math) to malformations in the right parietal lobe of the brain.

Researchers using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), stimulated the brain just as subjects without dyscalculia were about to complete a maths task, comparing two digits. They had to decide which digit was numerically larger, 2 or 4, but the 2 was written in a larger font than the 4.

Researchers found that subjects with normal math ability displayed behaviour similar to those with dyscalculia when they TMS was used to disrupt neuronal activity in the right intraparietal sulcus.

University College, London - The Root of Dyscalculia Found

Those hours you spent dragging a rosined bow across squeaky strings were not just wasted hours of your childhood even if you did not go on to become lead violinist with the New York Philharmonic.

A study by Northwestern University researchers found that musical training when we are young, fine-tunes the brain’s auditory system and enhances sound encoding skills in both music and language.

It makes sense because all language involves pitch and inflection and in some languages, pitch is key to understanding, such as when one word may have alternate meanings depending on whether it is said with a falling or rising tone.

“Increasing music experience appears to benefit all children — whether musically exceptional or not — in a wide range of learning activities,” says Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory and senior author of the study.

In the study, the differences in the tone of the Mandarin word “mi” was more easily noticed by those who had musical training than those who did not, even though none of them spoke any Mandarin. The word “mi” changes in meaning depending on pitch.

So the next time you think wistfully of all the vacant lot ballgames you missed while at piano lessons or perfecting your proficiency at the flute, keep in mind that your musical training prepared your brain to better experience more and varied learning activities.

At a New Jersey movie theatre in 1957, James Vicary claimed to have conducted experiments that would lead to a public outcry. According to Vicary, he flashed messages during the screening of the movie that said “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Hungry? Eat Popcorn”.

James Vicary had a theory. He claimed that what he called “subliminal” messages, displayed for 1/300 of a second - below the level of conscious perceptiblity - could influence people’s behavior but working in their subconscious. Vicary claimed that as a result of his experiment, sales of food and drink at the theatre went up substantially.

Later Vicary would admit that his figures were not accurate, in fact it isn’t even known for sure whether he actually conducted the experiment at all. It was still true in the minds of the public, who probably never heard much about his later confession and true for television and radio advertisers who regularly used subliminal advertising techniques until the FCC banned their use in 1974.

Now it seems that Vicary may have been at least partially correct in his theory. Researchers at University College London have found physiological evidence that subliminal images do attract the brain’s attention on a subconscious level.

Using functional MRI, they found that images that reach the retina, also result in a response from the primary visual cortex, even if we are not consciously aware of them. But a lot depends on what the brain is doing at the time that the subliminal image is flashed. If the brain is actively setting its attention on other tasks, then the images cause no increase in neural activity. In other words, whether the image or message is registered in your subconscious or not depends on whether or not the brain has the capacity to register them.

Dr Bahador Bahrami, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the UCL Department of Psychology, said: “What’s interesting here is that your brain does log things that you aren’t even aware of and can’t ever become aware of. We show that there is a brain response in the primary visual cortex to subliminal images that attract our attention – without us having the impression of having seen anything. These findings point to the sort of impact that subliminal advertising may have on the brain. What our study doesn’t address is whether this would then influence you to go out and buy a product. I believe that it’s likely that subliminal advertising may affect our decisions – but that is just speculation at this point.”

Subliminal advertising leaves its mark on the brain