The programme also covers the story of HM’s brain after his death – which you can read about here. Provokes some interesting ethical questions about a person who couldn’t give informed consent.

The previous case studies series covered Kitty Genovese, The Wild Boy of Aveyron, The Man with the Hole in his Head and Little Hans. Some of these can be downloaded from Psychexchange, see here.

The experimental task was to watch a 10-minute video clip of a Scarborough shopping district , and participants had to remember a series of instructions which they then had to carry out when they saw specified locations.

So what happened? The binge drinkers did far worse than the non-binging students, recalling significantly fewer combinations of location-action/items. This form of recall linking an action to a point in the future is known as prospective memory, for example remembering to go to a doctor’s appointment.

Research team leader Heffernan points out that so far there is no known “safe” level for teenagers’ drinking, and that possibly excessive drinking might interfere with the neuro-cognitive development of the teenage brain. This research adds to the evidence which is mounting up that because teenage brains are still maturing and undergoing significant development in terms of structure and function they could be seriously affected by environmental factors such as alcohol binges. However, one fact which has come out of this research is that self-reports showed that binging participants did not think their own memory functioned poorly, suggesting that they are unaware of the damage being caused.

But equally interesting is the software that has been used to produce it – you can have a play here – it’s really easy to use, and you have to agree the presentations look pretty slick..

I was wondering – this could be used for a quick class experiment: Ask one group to present information using powerpoint (i.e. in a linear fashion), ask another to present the same info using the more hierarchical prezi software, to see if the way in which information is organised affects recall in independent groups of subjects?

The first article describes a recent mass experiment conducted by Slate where they used some of Elizabeth Loftus’ techniques to plant false political memories.

Dreams, drugs, intelligence, memory, infant brains, psychoanalysis, human evolution and many more – Loads of online broadcasts from Melvyn Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’ Radio 4 series to be found here – all free – it makes one proud to be a licence payer….

Keep your queries coming in!

If anyone finds copies elsehwere, let us know!

Very nice little interactive diagram to be found here. You click on an activity such as ‘speech’ or ‘memory’ and the diagram indicates which part of the brain governs such activity.

Now in 2009 similar information is being given by Fischhoff who has pointed out the relevance of psychological research to addressing the current health issue. He has told USA authorities that health communications should

• Be truthful, factual, even is this is worrying, i.e. demonstrate that you trust your audience.
• Focus only on the most critical facts as people can retain only so much information. (Remember Miller’s magic number and chunking?)
• Emotions can interfere with memory (Loftus showed this a long time ago) so communicators should be calm and positive in their manner.
• Recommendations need to be reasonable for the target population so they can see that they can be successful in complying and therefore carry on listening and remembering ( locus of control v learned helplessness; cognitive consistency).

I do wonder if these recommendations could be spread more widely – Westminster comes to mind!