Psychological Set in the EEG View
Scientists can now predict memory of an event before it even happens. A team at UCL (University College London) can now tell how well memory will serve us before we have seen what we will remember.
Scans of brain activity, published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience, indicate that the brain can actually get into the 'right frame of mind' to store new information and that we perform at our best if the brain is active not only at the moment we get new information but also in the seconds before.
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The interesting part of this research is that the researchers were able to observe brain activity (by EEG) that gave good predictions on whether the participants would remember or not. People have known for many years that preceding experiences affect memory. That is common knowledge and why we often tell people to pay attention when we are about to say something we think is important. The effect is widely studied in psychology as psychological set. Psychology also offers useful recommendations about how people can prepare their brains to remember things. Predicting is good. Being able to do something about it is much better.
The research described here may later be able to evaluate various was to get in the “right frame of mind” for remembering. And perhaps clarify the role of boredom as the wrong frame of mind (The Brain Borers That Ate Your Memory). I think we can guess that boredom is the wrong frame of mind for remembering. Or, as psychologists would prefer to say, an inappropriate psychological set.
Scans of brain activity, published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience, indicate that the brain can actually get into the 'right frame of mind' to store new information and that we perform at our best if the brain is active not only at the moment we get new information but also in the seconds before.
-----
The interesting part of this research is that the researchers were able to observe brain activity (by EEG) that gave good predictions on whether the participants would remember or not. People have known for many years that preceding experiences affect memory. That is common knowledge and why we often tell people to pay attention when we are about to say something we think is important. The effect is widely studied in psychology as psychological set. Psychology also offers useful recommendations about how people can prepare their brains to remember things. Predicting is good. Being able to do something about it is much better.
The research described here may later be able to evaluate various was to get in the “right frame of mind” for remembering. And perhaps clarify the role of boredom as the wrong frame of mind (The Brain Borers That Ate Your Memory). I think we can guess that boredom is the wrong frame of mind for remembering. Or, as psychologists would prefer to say, an inappropriate psychological set.
posted by Selby Evans at 11:28 AM
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