Tecnología o trampas a la memoria

No hay acuerdos respecto a qué tanto afecta nuestra memoria el uso constante de tecnología.

Alguien dijo hace poco que a teléfonos cada vez más inteligentes, mentes cada vez más estúpidas.


Hay gente que opina que la facilidad con que los datos se almacenan en las memorias artificiales, sea celular, tableta o computador, es directamente proporcional a la velocidad con que la memoria humana pierde agilidad para los datos que, hasta hace un tiempo, eran asunto de rutina.

La discusión al respecto no es nueva. Nació con el desarrollo de internet y su infinita capacidad de saberlo todo.

El neurólogo Luis Alfredo Villa no cree que almacenar todos los datos importantes en un teléfono haga que se atrofie la memoria humana.

"Si una persona se acuerda de en qué barrio fue el último atraco, o con qué se cortó un dedo la última vez, significa que está almacenando en su memoria los datos importantes, aquellos que le ayudan al cerebro a protegerse. Que una persona olvide teléfonos de amigos cercanos no tiene problema, porque para esto están los dispositivos. De hecho, saber utilizar y administrar estos aparatos es, de por sí, un ejercicio de memoria más importante".

Este especialista afirma que saberse un número teléfono no es un factor protector de la memoria. "Einstein utilizaba el mismo suéter verde todos los días, tenía siete iguales. Él decía que había otras formas para aprovechar la memoria. Si se puede ahorrar esfuerzo mental, para eso se inventaron estos dispositivos".

Diego Rosselli, también neurólogo, tiene una mirada distinta. Opina que delegar tantas tareas del cerebro a los dispositivos puede tener un efecto en la evolución. "Los muchachos de hoy dicen que ya no tienen que aprenderse nada porque para eso está Wikipedia. El efecto que esto tenga en las capacidades mentales del ser humano tardará un poco en demostrarse, pero soy un convencido de que al cabo de un tiempo, esto hará que la manifestación de las enfermedades de la memoria, se presente más rápidamente".

En algo están de acuerdo estos especialistas. La memoria se debe ejercitar, como cualquiera de los órganos vitales, hay que mantenerlo activo para que conserve sus funciones al día.

La actividad intelectual es para ellos insustituible. "Es probable que un pensionado que se dedica solo a ver televisión pierda la memoria más rápidamente que otro que conserve el hábito de la lectura", dice Rosselli.

Para Villa una buena idea es ponerse retos mentales, la lectura es el mejor de ellos. "Desde que se entra en la parte media de la vida, entre los 40 y los 50 años, la mejor actividad es la lectura. Adicionalmente se recomienda una dieta alta en antioxidantes, que son los que protegen la vida de las neuronas, además de que son aconsejados para la salud cardiovascular", concluye el especialista n

"Los cerebros que mejor se preservan del paso del tiempo son los que tienen actividad intelectual durante toda la vida".

Tomado de: http://www.elcolombiano.com/BancoConocimiento/T/tecnologia_o_trampas_a_la_memoria/tecnologia_o_trampas_a_la_memoria.asp

Learning is the key to fear eradication

Scientists at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) have discovered that fear responses can be erased by making people learn something new whilst retrieving their fear memories. The researchers, whose work has been published in the journal Science, found that whereas patients who are treated with conventional cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) often regain their fears, fear responses did not return to participants who underwent this new technique.

In order to test whether or not participants had learned anything new, the team employed a strategy of prediction error; a situation in which a subject’s anticipation of what is going to happen is incongruous with what takes place in actuality. After using conditioning to create fear anticipation and responses, the scientists combined learning with the beta blocker propranolol to erase those fear responses. Even when they tried to reintroduce these responses, the researchers found that the fears did not return.

In an interview with ScienceOmega.com, participating researcher Professor Merel Kindt explained how this new strategy could eventually be used to help patients with conditions such as anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)…

How does the technique that you have developed differ from today’s CBT?

Traditional CBT makes use of extinction learning. The idea is that the new memory formed through this technique regulates and suppresses the original fear memory, thereby reducing the previously learned fear response.

In contrast, we set out to weaken the underlying fear memory. We engineered a situation in which there was something to be learned. Using prediction error, we created a mismatch between what participants were anticipating and what actually happened. When they learned that their environment was in some way different to what they had been expecting, their fear memory was destabilised. This is an important factor because if the memory trace is not destabilised, there can be no break in synthesis. In turn, the propranolol prevents this break from being repaired and the fear response does not return.

Do you understand why learning is so important to the eradication of fear responses? How are the two processes connected?

Think about the function of memory. We learn a lot of things and our ability to retrieve these pieces of information is really helpful. If we were not able to do this, we would have to constantly relearn what we learned previously. Memories need to be stable from a functional perspective. If the environment doesn’t change, why would a related memory trace be altered or erased? The only reason for a memory to be altered is if the environment is found to have changed.

So the memory relates to something that you believe to be true, and by learning that things are different, your fear response is modified…

Yes. People usually talk about memory in terms of easily recallable declarative memory: facts or knowledge. However, the largest proportion of human memory expresses itself through behaviour, performance, fear, etc. This type of memory is often called emotional memory. It is important to note that our technique only erases fear responses, i.e. components of fear memory.

In our last paper, we manipulated the different conditions and we demonstrated that when nothing has been learned, the propranolol does not erase the fear response. However, when participants who had learned a fear the day before were administered propranolol, they retrieved what they had learned but without the fear response. Of course, this situation is largely artificial. Essentially, we have conducted an experimental study to show the causal relation between prediction error and fear erasure.

What are the next steps for your research?

The next step is to test this procedure in patients with anxiety disorders. We are in the process of designing two studies: one for patients suffering from PTSD and another for a group with panic disorder. We are now at the experimental phase whereby we search for the optimal procedure and run randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to see whether this technique remains effective in patients. Of course, we cannot yet say with any certainty whether or not this will be the case. After all, our laboratory investigations have been conducted on healthy participants. One can only assume that the fear responses of real patients will be much stronger and more complex than the artificial responses that we manufactured in the laboratory.

Even so, the results that we have so far obtained from lab tests are much stronger and more convincing than those related to extinction learning, and extinction learning is the current experimental model used in CBT. For this reason, we are quite confident that our technique will prove to be effective. 

Tomado de: http://www.scienceomega.com/article/827/learning-is-the-key-to-fear-eradication

¿Podríamos agotar nuestra memoria?

Sí, pero sólo en cierto modo. La memoria depende de la formación de nuevas conexiones neuronales y el cerebro tiene un número finito de neuronas y un espacio limitado en el que añadir más conexiones entre ellas. Sin embargo, un cerebro sano nunca deja de aprender.

En realidad no existe tal cosa como "un recuerdo". Cuando evocamos un hecho o un acontecimiento que nos pasó a nosotros, esto se traduce en redes de células interconectadas.

A veces, si no podemos recordar un evento de una manera, podemos traerlo a la mente por medio de conexiones diferentes.

A medida que envejecemos y tenemos cada vez más cosas que recordar, las conexiones se vuelven más complejas. Incluso, cuando nuestro cerebro está sobrecargado, se utilizan las mismas neuronas para varios recuerdos de maneras muy flexibles.

Así, es posible que seamos más propensos a confundir acontecimientos o a tener dificultades en recordar, pero en realidad no podemos decir que "nos hemos quedado sin memoria".

Tomado de: http://www.publimetro.cl/nota/vida/podriamos-agotar-nuestra-memoria/xIQmbm!Ehm18tbbi7Tho/

INVITACIÓN. II Encuentro de la RILCC y I Simposio en Ciencia Cognitiva

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Human memory study adds to global debate

An international study involving researchers from the University of Adelaide has made a major contribution to the ongoing scientific debate about how processes in the human brain support memory and recognition.


The study used a rare technique in which data was obtained from within the brain itself, using electrodes placed inside the brains of surgery patients. Obtained in Germany, the data was sent to the University of Adelaide's School of Psychology for further analysis using new techniques developed there. 

The results are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "Being able to understand how human memory works is important because there is a range of conditions that affect memory, such as Alzheimer's disease, head injury, and ageing," says Professor John Dunn, 

Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Adelaide and a co-author of the study, which was led by researchers at the universities of Cambridge, UK, and Bonn, Germany. "Scientists know a lot about memory from years of study, but there is an ongoing debate about how certain mechanisms in the brain process memory, and how those mechanisms work together. "What we're looking at is how the human brain processes 'recognition memory', which is our ability to recognise people, objects or events that we've encountered in the past.

" The debate has centered on two key regions in the brain: the hippocampus, which is very important to memory and is one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage from Alzheimer's disease; and the perirhinal cortex, which receives sensory information from all of the body's sensory regions. "The debate is whether or not these two regions work in the same or different ways to support memory and recognition Studies over the years have led to both conclusions," 
Professor Dunn says. 

He says this new study, which uses data from inside the brain instead of from electrodes on the scalp, far from the critical regions, revealed that different processes are at work in the hippocampus and the perirhinal cortex. "Our analysis shows that these regions are responding to and processing memory in two very different ways. The activity levels in those regions changed in different ways according to the amount of information that could be remembered," Professor Dunn says. "This study won't settle the debate once and for all, but it does add weight to those scientists who believe that these two distinct parts of the brain respond to memory in different ways," he says.

Tomado de:  http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-02-human-memory-global-debate.html#jCp

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