Open a new tab and forget what you were about to do? Brain-stimulating skull electrodes may be the solution

Open a new tab and forget what you were about to do? Brain-stimulating skull electrodes may be the solution

Filed under: Fun

In recent months I've been losing my mind. I don't know if I actually have something wrong upstairs, but I have been finding it increasingly hard to keep things -- ideas, snippets, variables -- in short-term memory. I think, though, that it's just a symptom of Information Overload. I sit here, hour after hour, day upon day, scanning RSS feeds, IRC rooms and forums. The amount of new data, videos and funny cat photos is simply overwhelming; I can't keep it all in my head! I guess it's inevitable that some things spill over the edge.

But it turns out that there might be some help on the horizon for Information Brokers like myself. With the help of brain-stimulating skull electrodes -- or, more succinctly, a thinking cap -- both the capacity and accuracy of your visual short-term memory can be doubled.

I'll try and break down the complex biotechnological stuff. We have two anterior temporal lobes (ATL) in our brain, by our left and right temples. The left ATL is for context processing (where have I seen that face or heard that sound before?), while the right ATL is where a lot of visual memory takes place. It's already been found that those with damaged left ATLs (weaker context processing) have better visual memories (very similar to autists), so the researchers decided to stimulate the right ATL to see if a similar effect could be achieved, without the need to damage the brain!

Sure enough, during testing, stimulating the right ATL improved visual memory by an astonishing 110%! To put it another way, by running a weak non-invasive electrical current across a part of the brain, the participants of this test were granted something similar to photographic memory.

Of course, I don't know whether memorising shapes (faces, objects, tools) without their context is particularly useful. But I'm interested in the short-term capabilities of such technology. When you forget what you were going to search for in the time it takes to switch to Firefox and open a new browser tab... well... I'll take what I can get!

Open a new tab and forget what you were about to do? Brain-stimulating skull electrodes may be the solution originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Eliza Dushku
Adriana Lima