Brain's Cache Memory Found 531
Shipud writes "Electrical activity in a single section of the brain has been linked to very short-term
working memory, as is
reported at Nature. Very short-term working memory capacity is thought to be related to intelligence. In the same way that a larger cache speeds processing time, people with a greater capacity for holding images in their heads are expected to have better reasoning and problem-solving skills. The localization of this ability is a surprising finding, as until now it was believed that STWM was diffused throughout the cortex, rather than localized."
The magical number 7 (Score:5, Informative)
Did it not also depend on what kind of (was it) chunks you store (if this is at all what is stored in should it perhaps be ultra-) STM ?
Where it "started": [well.com]
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
by George A. Miller
originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97
CC.
A coincidence (Score:4, Informative)
Wonderful book.
Anyway, this is just the "visuospatial sketchpad" as the authors call it. There's also the phonological loop dealing with meaningful sounds, among other types of working memory. So this isn't the be-all and end-all of even immediate memory.
Re:Overclocking Anyone?? (Score:2, Informative)
Mal-2
Re:Man vs machine (Score:5, Informative)
Steam engines were mighty popular, Freud's psychoanalysis is partly based on the stream engine analogy (mental "pressure" a "governor", etc.) Today, quantum mechanics is popular with psychoanalists.
Re:Brain Cache (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Looks like... (Score:1, Informative)
You want to find the cube root of 53.6. You know that the nearest cube 64 = 4^3.
4 * 3^2 = 48 (easy)
64 - 53.6 = 10.4 (easy)
10.4 / 48 = 0.2 (approximate)
4 - 0.2 = 3.8
So the answer is about 3.8. This is correct to within 1 percent. The main problem with this method is that it contains a division step. But if you only need 2 digits of accuracy, it can be done quickly on the blackboard or in one's head.
Re:Hmmm. Sounds good. (Score:2, Informative)
So if this short term memory is linked directly to intelligence
Here ought to be a bit of interesting reading on intelligence:
Gottfredson, Linda S. (1998, Winter). The general intelligence factor. Scientific American Presents, 9(4), 24-29. http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/199
Gottfredson, Linda S. (1997). Why g matters: The complexity of everyday life. Intelligence, 24(1), 79-132. http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/199
Gardner, Howard (1999). Intelligence Reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, Howard. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Jensen, Arthur R. (1998) The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability. Westport, Conneticut: Praeger Publishers
Tor Nørretranders (1991) Mærk Verden: En fortælling om bevidsthed. Købenavn: Gyldendal. Fortæller bl.a. om evoked potential.
http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/topics/int
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/PIs/HG.htm (2000). Biographical data on Howard Gardner, Principle Investigators, Project Zero Website.
http://www.nea.org/neatoday/9903/meet.html (1999). NEA Today Online, Meet Howard Gardner: All kinds of smarts.
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell (2000-2003) Human Intelligence. An Indiana University Website.
Article (Score:2, Informative)
Single spot in brain determines size of visual scratch pad.
15 April 2004
TANGUY CHOUARD
The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain.
The finding surprises researchers who assumed this aspect of our intelligence would be distributed over many parts of the brain. Instead, the area appears to form a bottleneck that might limit our cognitive abilities, researchers say.
"This is a striking discovery," says John Duncan, an intelligence researcher at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK.
Most people can hold three or four things in their minds at once when given a quick glimpse of an image such as a collection of coloured dots, or lines in different orientations. If shown a similar image a second later, they will be able to recognise whether three or four of these spots and lines are identical to the first set or not.
But some people can only catch one or two things in a glance, while others can capture up to five.
This very short-term memory capacity is thought to be related to intelligence. In the same way that a computer with a larger working memory can crank through problems more quickly, people with a greater capacity for holding images in their heads are expected to have better reasoning and problem-solving skills.
A person's working memory capacity can be determined using simple psychological tests. But now two teams of researchers report in Nature that they can see it in brain scans too.
Keep it in mind
One of the teams, led by Edward Vogel of the University of Oregon in Eugene, found that the electrical activity in a single section of the brain, as detected through electrodes attached to the scalp, is directly related to short-term working memory1.
The team first tested subjects with an image of two coloured dots, waiting a second between flashes and asking the subjects if the image had changed. They then ramped up the test to four dots.
A large increase in the subject's brain activity on the four-dot test indicated that his or her memory capacity had not been pushed to its limit. No increase in electrical activity indicated that his or her working memory had topped out on the two-dot test. By graphing these responses, the team worked out the exact size of each subject's working memory.
A second team, led by René Marois of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, used functional magnetic resonance imaging during similar tasks to accurately locate the part of the brain being used for short-term visual memory2.
Both teams concluded that everything depended on the same tiny spot in the posterior parietal cortex.
"It is amazing that both groups should converge on the same area in the end," says Duncan. Since the task involves remembering many different aspects of each object, including spatial position, orientation and colour, most people thought that several parts of the brain would be involved, he says.
There are still many other aspects to human intelligence that are governed by other parts of the brain, the authors of both studies warn. But the capacity of one's working memory may form a bottleneck for certain kinds of intelligence, they say.
Tanguy Chouard is a senior biological sciences editor at Nature
References
Vogel, E. K. & Machizawa, M. G. . Nature, 428, 748 - 751, doi:10.1038/nature02447 (2004).
Todd, J. J. & Marois, R. . Nature, 428, 751 - 754, doi:10.1038/nature02466 (2004).
Re:Memory and Intelligence (Score:3, Informative)
The type of memory being considered here is distinct from short term memory. Working memory is used for things like holding a phone number in your head while you dial it, or recognising the difference between two phrases in a tune. We can hold a small amount of one type of thing in working memory at a time, a number, a sentence, an image and so on. As soon as a new piece of data enters working memory the previous piece of data is lost.
Working memory is used in problem solving, hence the link with intelligence. For example, people who can hold nine digits in working memory will tend to be better at doing calculations than those that have a digit span of five. Short term memory holds a lot more than working memory and can be recalled, or in your case not.
Re:Great (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Planned Motor Memory (Score:2, Informative)