The human capacity to forget is not merely a failure of memory but a fundamental adaptive mechanism. Memory suppression and intentional forgetting involve the active inhibition of unwanted or ...

Memory researcher Dr. Scott Small would like to reassure you that you’re not losing your wits. Visit him in his lab at Columbia University’s Medical Center, tell him how the last time you went to a ...

One of the most actively debated questions about human and non-human culture is this: under what circumstances might we expect culture, in particular the ability to learn from one another, to be ...

Social learning is typically thought to be most beneficial when the environments in which individuals live change quite slowly – they can safely learn tried and tested information from one another and ...

Rather than holding information in specific areas of the brain, our memories are represented by the connections between neurons, called synapses. According to a recent study from the Salk Institute in ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. People tend to lose prospective memory as they age. Malte Mueller/fStop via Getty Images Have you ever walked into a room and then ...

Every time I run around in my apartment looking for my lost keys, I curse my poor memory. The fact that I forgot where I put them is due to my brain not working as it should. That is at least what it ...

We tend to celebrate memory, not forgetting; however, forgetting may be what keeps our minds flexible enough to adapt and learn. At Flinders University, a team of researchers has shown that the same ...

One of the most actively debated questions about human and non-human culture is this: under what circumstances might we expect culture, in particular the ability to learn from one another, to be ...

The night after my high school graduation, most of my classmates hit the bars to get drunk. Rather than join them, I picked a tamer celebration, assuming that I would be less likely to get into ...

It's easy to forget important events like a work deadline or an anniversary, but understanding how memory works can help. Cognitive psychologist Endel Tulving introduced the idea of episodic and ...