Memory is not one thing but many: there is our store of facts, our skills or ‘how to’ abilities, personal recollections of events, unconscious knowledge, and our continuous monitoring of the immediate past. Different parts of the brain handle each of these memory functions. The human memory system evolved in a rough-and-ready fashion. New skills […]

The first hundred years or so of psychology have unraveled many of the mysteries of memory. Memory Memory is no longer perceived as a single brain function but rather as a set of distinct faculties that have different uses and operate over different time scales. A memory can last for anything from a fraction of

Psychologists have many models and theories to help explain how we form and access our memories, and have discovered a variety of different types of memory. These exercises will help you to discover some of the many different aspects of your memory. Working Memory Explore the separate audio and visual stores in your working memory.

PNI stands for psychoneuroimmunology – where ‘psycho’ means the mind, ‘neuro’ the nervous system, and ‘immunology’ means the body’s immune defenses. This new medical discipline focuses on the mechanisms by which the mind is able to affect the body and takes a whole-body approach to these systems rather than looking at them separately. PNI began

There is a widespread belief that some symptoms are ‘physical’ while others are ‘in mind.’ But mind and body are linked in a single complex system – so if one part of the system is damaged or malfunctioning, the rest is bound to be adversely affected. Illness makes itself known in two ways: by signs

Whenever your mouth waters at the mention of chocolate, or you find yourself working harder after a few words of praise, you are demonstrating conditioned responses in the way you react to the world. Learning by simple association, or ‘conditioning,’ was once thought by psychologists to be the mechanism that explains most human behavior. Now,

The brain’s left and right hemispheres are almost mirror images, each controlling and responding to messages from the other side of the body. Yet, the two hemispheres work in slightly different ways. Imagine a pair of twins who have lived together all their lives, sharing every thought, sensation, and emotion through continuous dialogue. Each of

We readily associate the mind and the brain with intelligence because we use our brains to learn new facts and to draw conclusions. However, the brain is much more than a tool for thinking – it is the command center of the body, and in this role, it strongly influences our health and well-being. The

Look at a collection of family photographs, and you can see the influence of genes on shared physical characteristics such as eye color and the shape of facial features. Genes are also a known factor in certain illnesses, including heart disease and some cancers. But when it comes to personality and behavior, the role played

For much of history, the brain has been a mysterious ‘black box.’ The only clue to what went on inside was what came out of it. During the 20th century, a variety of approaches were used to explore how the mind functions. Today, brain imaging techniques are bringing us tantalizingly close to seeing the workings