remember when i took that home wine making course and i forgot how to drive?

Remember that time I took a home wine-making course and forgot how to drive?Marge: That's because you were drunk.Homer: And how! This long-running animated comedy focuses on the eponymous family in the town of Springfield in an unnamed U.S. state. The head of the Simpson family, Homer, is not a typical family man.

Full Answer

Why do we forget?

What is the Homer Simpson effect?

How many participants did Maria Wimber study?

Why did the researchers want to track and compare changes in the participants’ memories for images they had been asked to recall and?

Which part of the brain is responsible for suppressing interfering memories?

Does memory cause forgetting?

Is Homer Simpson a neuroscientist?

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Why do we forget?

We knew, from earlier work, that remembering can cause forgetting, and this is thought to occur because of an inhibitory signal from the frontal cortex that suppresses similar memories and prevents them from interfering with retrieval. Until now, though, evidence for this has been hard to come by, one reason being that it is difficult to distinguish between the brain activity patterns associated with related memories using fMRI.

What is the Homer Simpson effect?

Researchers say they have now observed this Homer Simpson Effect* in the brain for the first time. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging ( fMRI) combined with behaviour al tests, they show that the retrieval of visual memories causes forgetting of related memory traces. The work, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, suggests that the act of remembering past experiences might hinder our ability to recall similar events, or perhaps make our memories of them completely inaccessible.

How many participants did Maria Wimber study?

In this latest study, Maria Wimber and her colleagues recruited 24 healthy participants and trained them on a visual memory task in which they were shown a series of words, each associate with a pair of images. For example, the word ‘sand’ was shown with an image of Marilyn Monroe and then one of a hat. The researchers then scanned the participants’ brains while they performed a selective retrieval task, in which they saw some of the words again, and had to indicate the first image they associated with it.

Why did the researchers want to track and compare changes in the participants’ memories for images they had been asked to recall and?

The researchers wanted to track and compare changes in the participants’ memories for images they had been asked to recall and those they had not. They assumed that seeing each of the ‘cue’ words again would reactivate activity patterns for both of the associated images, and predicted that recalling one image would engage inhibitory mechanisms that actively diminish the memory of the other, competing image.

Which part of the brain is responsible for suppressing interfering memories?

The researchers then looked to the prefrontal cortex, parts of which have been identified as the likely source of a top-down control mechanism that detects and suppresses interfering memories. In support of this idea, they identified a small region of the ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex associated with suppression of the competing activity patterns. During the memory retrieval tasks, activity in this area decreased gradually with repeated showing of the reminder words, presumably because the memories grew stronger each time, so that suppressing the competing memory became less demanding.

Does memory cause forgetting?

Wimber and her colleagues say their findings strongly suggest that remembering induces forgetting by actively suppressing the brain activity encoding similar, interfering memories. They believe this is an adaptive mechanism that increases the likelihood that we will successfully encode and remember only the most relevant information. Top-down prefrontal control of memory seems to break down in schizophrenia and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), so follow-up work that provides more details about these processes could advance our understanding of such conditions.

Is Homer Simpson a neuroscientist?

Homer Simpson wasn’t a neuroscientist, but he evidently had some insight into how the brain works. In one episode of the long-running series, he explains why education is wasted on him: “Every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain,” he tells Marge. “Remember when I took that home wine-making course ...