Anyone who has owned a computer knows the more RAM the better. RAM, or remote access memory, is the computer equivalent of working memory. Working memory refers to the brain’s capacity to briefly hold and manipulate information. The latest research referred to on a website called Future Pundit by a research team at Michigan State University suggests that working memory can be the deciding factor between good and great. Some researchers break this down further into verbal working memory as well as numerical working memory and visual/non-verbal working memory. I know, for example, that I have poor visual/non-verbal working memory. The other two functions seem to work okay. For me this translates into problems learning from visual experiences. Or translating verbal instructions into movement. It became most apparent when I starting doing kobojutsu (karate weapons). The sensai (instructor) would demonstrate a sequence of moves and then ask me to do it. I would stand there with no idea, actually no mental picture, of what he had just done. I wouldn’t have been able to persist at it if I had not had an understanding instructor. His name was Jason Forbes and he was a fourth degree black belt. He was patient beyond belief. But perhaps even more importantly, if I wasn’t getting it, Jason took it as his fault and try to impart the information another way. I think this separates good teachers from the truly great. I don’t ever remember Jason losing his temper with me or even his patience in spite of the fact that I frequently lost both. Well to be honest what I experienced was frustration. Jason used to say that he could see the smoke coming out of my ears and at these times he would quietly suggest that I take a break and he would move on with the rest of the class.
Why am I posting this? For two reasons-one as an illustration of the frustration and sense of defeat that often goes hand-in-hand with learning disabilities and two to honor teachers like Jason who can make all the difference in the world, who make learning possible where it otherwise might not be.
Thanks Jason.
A new idea about why we dream was posted in Bill Klemm’s blog, thankyoubrain, yesterday. Bill is a semi-retired professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University. He says we dream because the brain becomes activated in REM sleep and that activated brains want to think and thinking while sleeping is experssed as dreams. Bill than asks why we have REM sleep at all. He cautions that it is a oversimplification but REM helps to re-boot a sleeping brain so that we can wake and be conscious. I don’t tend to remember dreams much and most that I do have seem pretty half hazard but the most vivid and the ones that seem to stick in memory are ones that I have in the morning in the hour or so before my alarm goes off. This happens even if I have awakened and fallen asleep again thinking I have more time before I have to get up so my last waking thought would be that I have to get up soon.
I had one dream about a week ago in which two people were present that I actually had to meet later in the day, one for lunch together and the other for dinner. In the portion of the dream with the person I was meeting the events were comical. Not so with the dinner partner. That portiion of the dream provided insights that were more or less absent from my waking brain, or at least had been until that dream.
Approximately 45 years ago a passion that had enriched my life and gave it meaning came to an end. Last Sunday, quite deliberately, I chose to revisit that passion to see what would happen.
Usually, this blog is about neuroplasticity and working memory but the overall theme is about the journey I have been on to understand my brain and how it works. It is with this greater theme in mind that I write this post. Beginning around the time I was 12 years old I had an all consuming interest in guns. That interest, or more correctly that passion was at first kindled by a regular birthday present from my father–our yearly visit to the Sportsman’s Show in Toronto in March to look and talk with manufacturers (Winchester, Remington, Browning, Mossberg, Savage) about their guns. My father was rather distant and we rarely did much together. Looking back now it probably was largely because as a dedicated bank employee, he had little free time. But the Sportsman’s Show was one event we regularly connected through and I loved him for it. It was a different era back then. If I was growing up now I’m sure my parents would have discouraged this passion but they not only allowed they encouraged it. My graduation present from public school from them was a Winchester 22 caliber slide-action rifle and I used it every Saturday morning for two years to shoot targets with a friend at a range in the basement of York Armories in Toronto. In high school, I joined the rifle club and also shot once a week in the basement of the school with Lee Enfield 303 cal. rifles converted to 22 cal. I joined the Army Cadets to get a chance to shoot more guns and the summer, after my first year in high school, I went to Central Command Cadet Camp where we fired Lee Enfields using 303 caliber cartridges and the Bren light machine gun (same caliber). After my second year in high school I joined the student militia and got to fire the Canadian Forces new assault rifle–the FN C1 on ranges near Niagara-on-the-Lake. I ended up as Commanding Officer of my cadet corps and a Bombardier (Corporal) in the Artillery Militia. The artillery regiment was a medium one and they had really big guns–155mm howitzers. In my first year in university I joined the Canadian Officer Training Corps and went off to train at the Armored Corps School at Base Borden north of Toronto that first summer. We spent a lot of time on ranges learning to operate every weapon an ordinary front-line infantry soldier would come across.
But something happened at this point. I got discouraged. For reasons I won’t go into here I decided I wanted none of it–not the army, not the guns, not the career in the military and I quit before that training that summer was complete and asked to be discharged. I let the passion die. It was different times by then. The Vietnam war was just beginning to fill headlines and there was a general feeling, which still predominates, that guns kill people and therefore were bad. I really have nothing to say about this debate now. This post is about passion not politics but at the point I left Base Borden and eventually went back to my second year in university, I had a sour taste in my mouth about the military and about guns.
There was only one weapon that I did not get to train with that summer at Borden–the standard sidearm of the Canadian military at the time–the Browning 9mm automatic pistol.
As part of the exploration of my brain’s journey I, and a friend, decided to try our hand at pistol shooting and were invited to come last Sunday to a range used by the Forest Hill Revolver Club. As we were being briefed on range safety and operation of a 22 cal. target pistol made available by our host, I felt my brain stirring with old memories. I was invited to pick up the weapon and shown how to hold and fire it and then we stepped onto the range and into a vacant firing position and I heard the noise of pistols being discharged around me and the smell of gun smoke and felt like I had come home. I did okay with the target pistol. I scored 74. Not bad considering the 45 year gap. I guess our host was encouraged by my performance and leaned over to ask, “Would you like to try something larger.” I did and he produced a larger caliber automatic pistol, loaded it and handed it to me. I fired 10 rounds finding it much more difficult that the smaller caliber pistol I had just used. It wasn’t till I stepped back to let my companion shoot that she asked what it was. Our host said, “It’s a 9mm Browning automatic pistol.” I was home. All the sensations combined with the sense of completion at firing the Browning pistol that I had missed training with at Borden all those years ago …it all just felt right. I do pay attention to signs and as if just firing the Browning was not enough some how the pistol had deposited a 9mm shell casing in my pocket which I discovered when I stopped at a convenience store on the way home and pulled out my change. There it was amongst my change much to the alarm of the clerk behind the counter. In order to get there it would have had to bounce at least twice after being ejected from the pistol.
I will keep you posted.
A recent study by British and German scientists found that the part of the brain usually associted wtih long-term memory may also be associated with working memory. The study focused on the hippocampus which has traditionally been thought to have a role in long-term memory, spatial memory and navigation. This is also one of the first parts of the brain to suffer in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
The study looked at patients with temporal lobe epilepsy which causes problems in the hippocampus leading to short-term memory problems. The researchers said, “The patients could not distinguish the studied images from new images after 60 minutes but performed normally after five seconds.” Professor Emrah Duzel of University College London went on to say that a striking deficit emerged even at five seconds when the subjects were asked to recall the detailed arrangements of objects within scenes in photographs.
The study concluded that there are two distinct short-term memory networks within the brain. The other one that is separate from the hippocampus remains intact in patients with hippocampus-related disorders.
Nathan Cashdollar, also from University College London said, “This is the fist functional and anatomical evidence showing which mechanisms are shared between short-term and long-term memory and which are independent.”
The findings of this study, I think, are interesting in showing that there are distinct elements to short-term memory and that they are located in different areas of the brain. When I was in Dr. Attila Turgay’s (one of the leading experts on ADHD in Canada) office last year he did three separate tests for short-term memory: verbal, numerical and spatial. It was only spatial short-term memory with which I had trouble. If indeed this function is located in a different part of the brain than either verbal or numeric working memory it does make sense that one aspect of working memory would by dysfunctional while the other two are intact.