Remember to Forget

Mental Floss Magazine posted a fascinating article about super-autobiographical memory last week. The piece profiles four adults who share the ability to recall tiny, seemingly insignificant details from long ago. The possibility that everything we experience is stored somewhere in our brain goes back to experiments by British neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who provoked specific, long-forgotten memories in his patients by touching parts of their temporal lobes with an electric probe. One epileptic patient relived a childhood experience of smelling burnt toast each time Penfield stimulated a particular location on her cortex.
     If the people profiled in Mental Floss can control their access to the huge database in their brains, why can’t the rest of us? The coming decades may explain why, or they may show us how we can recover long-forgotten details, too. But I suspect that we will also learn that our ability to forget—to flush destructive or superfluous data or memories--is at least as important as our ability to remember.  Especially if the data we’re talking about contains viral components that can keep our brains pinwheeling while other key bits of data--our lives-- pass us by.  Those of us who can’t remember every episode of Flipper should  thank our lucky stars.
   One hot and relevant area of current research focuses on the role of attention in helping the brain decide what to hold onto and what to flush. Take a look, for instance, at this Journal of Neuroscience paper by Adam Gazzaley and Theodore P. Zanto showing how "top-down" attention is related to memory acquisition. Choosing what to remember and what to let slide sounds good, but  I wonder if our conscious minds can always be trusted to know what's important to remember and what's not?

Epilepsy a Window Onto Brain Function

John Blanchard/ The Chron

A good piece in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle reviews the key role epilepsy patients and their doctors have played in the history of neuroscience. The article, Epilepsy Opens a New Window Onto Brain Function, by Kristen Brown, focuses on the emerging importance of intracranial studies of epilepsy patients whose brains have been wired with electrodes to help locate the foci of their seizures. While these patients are being observed, they often donate their wired-brain-time to science, granting by far the best available extended access to the inside of a conscious human brain. But Brown's piece also looks at key contributions of Henry Molaison, who taught us much of what we know about human memory when his hippocampus was removed to quell his seizures, and Wilder Penfield, who first described the functional geography of the motor and sensory cortices by systematically stimulating and observing the effects in his patients.

This is fascinating stuff! Someone should write a book on the subject!