Smarts.......

[homeschoolmom]

All right... a show of hands... how many thought this thread would be about these?:

[img]http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/06/images/smart_car.jpg[/img]

[txdinghysailor]

[quote name='HisChildForever' post='1795492' date='Mar 2 2009, 08:51 PM']Your brain.[/quote]

Well obviously, but your brain can only retain so much information. What decides what it retains and what it flushes down the drain? Luck.

[HisChildForever]

[quote name='txdinghysailor' post='1795501' date='Mar 2 2009, 07:55 PM']Well obviously, but your brain can only retain so much information. What decides what it retains and what it flushes down the drain? Luck.[/quote]

So "luck" controls our biology as well as our intelligence?

[b] Area of brain found to play key role in initiating memory storage [/b]

Flee, freeze or fight. A response to a threat is based on experience and memory. Now scientists have discovered that an area of the brain, the amygdala, which was thought to store painful and emotion-related memories, also initiates memory storage in other brain regions.

There has been a growing debate on the function of the amygdala [pronounced uh-MIG duh-luh], an almond-shaped sub-cortical structure in the temporal lobe. It receives electrical signals carrying auditory information through axons traveling one way from the medial geniculate (MG) nucleus in the thalamus.

New research published in the Jan. 1 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience suggests that the amygdala plays a pivotal role in the initial process of storing memory elsewhere in the brain. The amygdala appears to decide which experiences are important enough to store ? a decision based on the emotional significance of the events in a decoding process that affects both learning and memory.

?Our data show that a disabled amygdala leads to a breakdown of learning-related changes in other parts of the brain,? said Michael Gabriel, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. ?Specifically, disabling the amygdala blocks learning-related changes in the sensory pathway, the media geniculate nucleus. These changes are essential for the ability to discriminate between important and unimportant sounds.?

Amy Poremba of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., is the co-author of the study. The National Institutes of Health funded the project through a grant to Gabriel, whose lab uses technology that allows for the simultaneous tracking of firing neurons in several places of the brain. In the study, involving 26 male rabbits, researchers temporarily disabled the amygdala. Rabbits with unaltered brains were able to learn the consequences of two differently sounding tones: one that resulted in nothing and another followed in five seconds by a mild shock to the feet. Rabbits that correctly learned the consequences could avoid the shock by moving the wheel under their feet. Those with blocked amygdalas failed to learn such a response to the shock-predicting tone.

In a follow-up study to appear later in the same journal, the researchers blocked the auditory cortex, through which return signals travel from the amygdala to the medial geniculate. Again, rabbits failed to differentiate the tones.

Instead of just getting input from the medial geniculate, Gabriel said, the amygdala appears to send signals back to the medial geniculate, allowing neurons to decipher the significance of the sounds. ?This work puts the amygdala in the middle of the circuitry, in a very prominent position in terms of relevance toward learning,? Gabriel said. The findings, he added, also are consistent with a theory originally formulated by James L. McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine. The new data, however, show how the theory is implemented in terms of the activity in the brain circuitry.

Source: [url="http://www.neuroskills.com/tbi/pr-amygdala.shtml"]http://www.neuroskills.com/tbi/pr-amygdala.shtml[/url]

[Era Might]

I get a lot of "Jeopardy!" questions correct without really knowing the answer. Sometimes I just know the answer because I've heard it before, somewhere, even though I don't remember where I heard it, and I don't even necessarily know what the answer means. I just know the answer. I think we pick up a lot of knowledge that we don't really use, but it's in the back of our minds, lurking, waiting for Alex Trebek to call it forth.

[rose wrought of iron]

[quote name='homeschoolmom' post='1795494' date='Mar 2 2009, 07:53 PM']All right... a show of hands... how many thought this thread would be about these?:

[img]http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/06/images/smart_car.jpg[/img][/quote]


Geez, DingySailor () you just opened up a can o worms...

[txdinghysailor]

But what controls the amygdala? It is the means by which people happen to remember things, but why does it choose certain memories to pull out of storage?

[HisChildForever]

[quote name='txdinghysailor' post='1795511' date='Mar 2 2009, 08:00 PM']But what controls the amygdala? It is the means by which people happen to remember things, but why does it choose certain memories to pull out of storage?[/quote]

This is an interesting article that is too long to post: [url="http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1749"]http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1749[/url]
It focuses on the role the amygdala plays in fear but there are explanations as to how the amygdala functions.

More information (on the amygdala): [url="http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-amygdala.htm"]http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-amygdala.htm[/url]

Semantic Memory: [url="http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-semantic-memory.htm"]http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-semantic-memory.htm[/url]

[txdinghysailor]

Still, if someone randomly asks you a question you don't know the answer too, you look dumb. What decides what question they ask?

[HisChildForever]

This is probably more what you are looking for:

Source: [url="http://www.wisegeek.com/how-does-human-memory-work.htm"]http://www.wisegeek.com/how-does-human-memory-work.htm[/url]

Human memory consists of information patterns being stored temporarily or permanently in the interconnection patterns and synaptic weightings among neurons in the brain. Although specific brain regions such as the hippocampus, amygdala, cerebellum, and basal ganglia have been implicated as being highly involved in specific aspects of memory, many researchers believe that memory may be a "field phenomenon" of the brain - not localized strongly in any one point, but in the entirety of the interconnective map that makes up the brain. This would be consistent with the observation that evolution prefers redundancy and animals with critical functions localized in any particular brain structure would be more subject to the degenerative threats of malnutrition or injury than those with distributed functions.

There are three ways of classifying memory. They include duration of memory retention, information type, and temporal direction. Duration of retention is seen as the most universal and useful.

From the perspective of duration of memory retention, there are three memory types: sensory memory, short term memory (STM) and long term memory (LTM). Sensory memory operates 200-500 ms immediately after a perceptual event and can hold approximately 12 items for a negligible quantity of time. Occasionally, experiences that begin as sensory memories transfer to short term memory, which can hold 5, plus or minus 2 items without rehearsal for somewhere between a minute to an hour. Short term memory is responsible for the "phonological loop" - our internal monologue reciting something to remember it.

The type of memory that is most pervasive, and with the largest capacity, is long-term memory. Long-term memories are built especially well through repetition and training and the complex web of memories that associate freely with other memories. Sometimes this web of long-term memories is called knowledge.

Within long-term memory, there are declarative (explicit) and procedural (implicit) memories. Procedural memories are motor-based and controlled by older sections of the brain. They include things like learning how to ride a bike. Declarative memory, which further breaks down into semantic and episodic/autobiographical memories, are at the core of what we consider the human experience. Semantic memories are abstract knowledge and the recital of facts, and episodic memories contain stories. The two types of declarative memory are intimately interrelated. If anything in this article was new to you, you've just added some substantial information to your semantic memory database.

[txdinghysailor]

Still, if someone randomly asks you a question you don't know the answer too, you look dumb. What decides what question they ask?

[HisChildForever]

[quote name='txdinghysailor' post='1795531' date='Mar 2 2009, 08:09 PM']Still, if someone randomly asks you a question you don't know the answer too, you look dumb. What decides what question they ask?[/quote]

You tell me. Why did you just ask me that question?

[txdinghysailor]

[quote name='HisChildForever' post='1795538' date='Mar 2 2009, 09:10 PM']You tell me. Why did you just ask me that question?[/quote]

Seemed like a good idea to me. But had it been someone else who had started this argument, they might've asked an entirely different question.

[HisChildForever]

[quote name='txdinghysailor' post='1795541' date='Mar 2 2009, 08:12 PM']Seemed like a good idea to me. But had it been someone else who had started this argument, they might've asked an entirely different question.[/quote]

Well read the biological explanations I provided if you are that curious about memory.

[txdinghysailor]

I did read them, but it still doesn't answer my question. What decides what information gets remembered?

[HisChildForever]

[quote name='txdinghysailor' post='1795544' date='Mar 2 2009, 08:17 PM']I did read them, but it still doesn't answer my question. What decides what information gets remembered?[/quote]

Post #24.