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To investigate further, the team attempted to boost subsequent participants' memory test scores by presenting them with images only when they showed this pattern of brain activity. "There was around a 30 per cent improvement in the memory task," Gabrieli says (NeuroImage, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.07.063).

The MIT team is now working on a way to monitor this "preparedness to learn" using electroencephalography (EEG) - a more portable and much cheaper brain-monitoring technique. Gabrieli's idea is to make learning more efficient by selectively teaching the prepared brain. "You could imagine a computer-based learning system which would stop when the brain is not prepared to learn and restart when it is," he says.

"Optimising these brain regions would provide a more sophisticated way of approaching a learning task," says Cohen. "It's a very exciting idea."

Science and technology researcher Professor Peter Bruza is leading a study to explore the similarities between associations in human and the quantum correlations, also known as quantum entanglement.

Professor Bruza said entanglement was a bizarre phenomenon in which seemingly separate quantum systems behaved as one.

(Source: Quantum Mechanics Could Be Used To Describe The Way Memory Works)

TABLE of CONTENTS

Foreword and Overview Focus of this Paper The Strengths and Limits of Science The Challenge of Clear Definition

A Model of Human Development A Working Definition of Collective Consciousness Developing a Theory, Model and Testable Hypotheses The Felt-Sense of Collective Consciousness: Tele-Prehension The Role of Subtle Energies Field Effects

In his new book, Aping Mankind – about which he was talking this week at the British Academy – he describes the cultural disease that afflicts us when we assume that we are nothing but a bunch of neurons.Neuromania arises from the doctrine that consciousness is the same as brain activity or, to be slightly more sophisticated, that consciousness is just the way that we experience brain activity.If you think the brain is a machine then you are committed to saying that composing a sublime poem is as involuntary an activity as having an epileptic fit. You will issue press releases announcing "the discovery of love" or "the seat of creativity", stapled to images of the brain with blobs helpfully highlighted in red or blue, that journalists reproduce like medieval acolytes parroting the missives of popes. You will start to assume that the humanities are really branches of biology in an immature form.

Tallis doesn't claim to know. He described himself as an "ontological agnostic", the nature of consciousness being a tremendous mystery. "We just don't know how we should think about being and how mind fits into nature. But we'll never learn if we start out taking all the wrong paths."