Article archive / July 1, 2014
Originally published: . Volume 5, No. 11. Source pages: 13.
LSU cognitive psychology scientist, Dr. Megan Papesh, is again in the media. Papesh is part of a multidisciplinary team from various research settings across the county that is investigating how the brain remembers. The team of researchers from Louisiana State University, U.C. San Diego, Barrow Neurological Institute, and Arizona State University combined their talents to discover how neurons code new memories.
The results were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and are being highlighted in the science writing of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. “What did you do today? Your brain ‘remembers’ it cell by cell,’ was the title featured in the June article for the LA Times.
The LA Times wrote, “Researchers took a closer look at the data to separate the outliers, using a statistical ‘quantile’ analysis not often used in their field. It showed the data fell in a pattern that the computational experts had predicted: Episodic memory neurons essentially were few and far between.”
In the New York Times June article, “Where Personal Memories Take Root,” the author noted that the new study is “lending weight to the theory of neuroscientists who believe that every memory is spread out, or distributed, across many neurons in that part of the brain.”.
Dr. Papesh has also authored new research demonstrating that people can’t match photo IDs nearly as well as expected, bringing into question issues of security programs that use photo ID matching to catch false passports and other high- risk situations. This also created a media buzz. (See Psychology Times, April 2014.)
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.