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New research shows that "lost" memories lurk in the brain waiting to be found again -- in mice, anyway. In a study published Thursday in Science, researchers were able to reactivate memories they'd suppressed, indicating that retrograde amnesia -- where memories are lost after brain trauma -- may be more of a memory retrieval problem than an actual loss of data.

Based on their findings, the researchers believe that "lost" memories may still leave engrams active in the brain.

When they extended the search further, they realized that other regions of the brain, including the amygdala, where where fear-based memories can be found, were also involved in this network. The researchers were therefore able to retrieve the memories because other connections in the brain — connections that were unaffected by the drug, but inaccessible without the light treatment — were storing information related to the shock treatment as well.

Amnesia remains a controversial subject in the field of neuroscience, with some researchers arguing that it occurs when cells are damaged and memory cannot be stored, while others believe that the memories are simply blocked and cannot be recalled.

The study, published in the US journal Science, indicated that memories do in fact remain, but are simply unable to be recollected.

The study allowed scientists to separate memory storage mechanisms from those allowing an organism to form and recover the memory, said MIT researcher Tomas Ryan, who co-authored the study.

While scientists generally try to stay out politics, letting evidence-based research to speak for itself, the strong division in American society has spread to science.

By analyzing millions of online purchases, researchers from Cornell, Yale and University of Chicago found that there are clear partisan preferences in how we buy books on scientific topics.

The study’s authors think it’s likely that people who buy political books get science books to support their views rather than out of a general interest in science.

Blockbusters, from the 2002 action thriller The Bourne Identity to last year’s Scarlett Johansson vehicle Lucy, reinforce pervading misconceptions about how the brain works.

“Watching movies about neurological disorders, if they’re done well, I think gives people an appreciation for what the characters may go through,” she says, while films that promote stereotypes “can actually be a little bit more hurtful to people who have those disorders.”

this 2003 Disney film offers surprisingly solid insight about a neurological disorder.

humans predict what the future will be like by using their memories

“When somebody’s preparing for a date with someone they’ve never been on a date with before, or a job interview—these situations where we don’t have past experience, that’s where we think this ability to imagine the future really matters,” says Karl Szpunar, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. People “can take bits and pieces, like who’s going to be there, where it’s going to be, and try to put all that together into a novel simulation of events.”

The first clue that memory and imagining the future might go hand in hand came from amnesia patients. When they lost their pasts, it seemed, they lost their futures as well.

what do you think the average person LIVING in postmodern society would say if you asked them…how do you determine what right or WRONG is in a given situation?

I think MOST people…a GOOD percentage of specifically YOUNG people alive today if you PRESSED them HARD enough on it would say that they think morality…is something that’s RELATIVE. 

They’ll say who am I to claim… that one culture is better or worse than any OTHER culture. THEIR values make sense to THEM…MY values make sense to ME. I can’t appeal to anything objectively BETTER about mine than theirs…and I CERTAINLY, as someone born into a postmodern type of subjectivity, have to be VERY skeptical of any sort of GRAND NARRATIVE that’s been constructed out there that tries to make CLAIMS about moral objectivity. Those don’t EXIST to me. So therefore, morality is relative. 

the authors were able to provide empirical evidence for a troubling phenomenon that seems to be all but baked in to the way our scientific culture operates: We pay lots of attention to things that are almost assuredly not true.

Because it’s sexier to discover something than to show there’s nothing to be discovered, high-impact journals show a marked preference for “initial studies” as opposed to disconfirmations. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever worked in a research lab knows, initial observations are almost inevitably refuted or heavily attenuated by future studies — and that data tends to get printed in less prestigious journals.  Newspapers, meanwhile, give lots of attention to those first, eye-catching results while spilling very little (if any) ink on the ongoing research that shows why people shouldn’t have gotten all hot and bothered in the first place.

The result? ”[A]n almost complete amnesia in the newspaper coverage of biomedical findings.”

Every modern presidential election is at least in part defined by the cool new media breakthrough of its moment.

In 2000, there was email, and by golly was that a big change from the fax. The campaigns could get their messages in front of print and cable news reporters — who could still dominate the campaign narrative — at will,

Then 2008: Facebook made it that much easier for campaigns to reach millions of people directly,

Automation bias refers to the tendency to favor the suggestions of automated systems.

Also known as “digital amnesia”, the aptly named Google Effect describes our tendency to forget information that can be easily accessed online.

Identified in 2011 by Michael Norton (Harvard Business School) and his colleagues, this cognitive bias refers to our tendency to attach a higher value to things we help create. Combining the Ikea Effect with other related traits, such as our willingness to pay a premium for customization, is a strategy employed by companies seeking to increase the intrinsic value that we attach to their products.

Why do so many of us hide our heads in the sand when faced with the possibility of a catastrophic future event?

we are governed by two cognitive systems: one that is more automated and drives instinctual decisions—like quickly moving away from danger—and another that involves more considered thought and drives deliberate decisions—like deciding what house to buy.

In these cases, we tend to rely on six biases that can lead us to misperceive our situation and potentially take wrong action (or avoid action altogether). These are nicely described in The Ostrich Paradox, as follows: Myopia: The tendency to focus more on the short-term costs than the future potential benefits of investments. Amnesia: The tendency to forget the lessons of past disasters. Optimism: The tendency to underestimate the likelihood of future hazards. Inertia: The tendency to maintain the status quo or adopt the default option when uncertain about the future benefits of investing now. Simplification: The tendency to selectively consider only certain factors when making choices involving risk. Herding: The tendency to follow the “wisdom” of the crowd.

Regardless of age, you're unlikely to have a flawless memory.

This is the tendency to forget facts or events over time. You are most likely to forget information soon after you learn it. However, memory has a use-it-or lose-it quality: memories that are called up and used frequently are less likely to be forgotten.

. For instance, people with amnesia that is caused by injury to the hippocampus have normal short-term memory, but they are unable to form new long-term memories. They forget information soon after they learn it. This is not the type of transience that normally affects people's memories.