On January 10 my daughter Audrey and I attended the Austin Forum, a regular monthly lecture by distinguished researchers from the University of Texas.  (Dad is always good for some live entertainment when the boyfriend is out of town.)  This forum series provides insights beyond the normal realm of TechDrawl content on entrepreneurial topics, and I hope you find this occasional brain food worth reading.  One of my loyal subscribers asked me recently how I could write on subjects about which I have no knowledge, and I assured him (let’s call him “Charlie”) that I am not alone in that practice.

The topic of the evening was “The Predictive Brain:  How Past Memories Influence Future Decisions”  -- presented by Dr. Alison Preston (pictured above), an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Section of Neurobiology and a member of the UT Center for Learning and Memory.  This drew a crowd well beyond the capacity of the venue at the AT&T Center, and as the Foursquare Mayor I found this to be rather heart warming.   (It may be “good to be the king,” but it sure is easy to become the mayor.  User initiated check-ins will soon be artifacts of a quickly forgotten era in the Consumer Internet.)

Now back to the topic, which does have an important lesson for all of us at the end…

Dr. Preston defined memory to include facts, acquired skills, habits or fears, and events you experience – all things supported by different parts of the brain.  Experiential memory is “mental time travel” and is housed in the Hippocampus, where her research team hangs out.  She showed a video trace of a single neuron in that region of the brain responding to the subject’s observing particular video clips, in the test case a Simpsons episode, and then again responding just to the recollection of that same stimulus.  I was at that point wondering if a glass of fine Single Malt kills a few brain cells, does it erase very specific experiences?

She showed interviews of research done with subjects who had lost their Hippocampus to a virus.  They exhibit anterograde amnesia -- no memory of events after the disease -- but are otherwise smart, full of prior memories, and engaging.  Since live subjects aren’t too keen on having cranial probes inserted or brain parts extracted, these rare subjects who have very specific injuries or illnesses are obviously prized research specimens.  She said that Alzheimer's looks the same in early stages but then progresses through the brain.  As one who has had two direct ancestors succumb to that disease, I’m hoping Dr. Preston’s work sheds some light on possible treatments.  Otherwise I’m going to buy a very fast motorcycle just prior to the age where that seems to overtake my strain of Dyers.

The Hippocampus glues together all the things that happen during an event and reactivates all the brain pathways associated with that event.   We can then use that memory to predict, and to imagine.  Shared content triggers recall of everything related in the past, and this remembering influences the way we learn.  She referred to this as “Inferential learning” – anticipating linkages among events and applying them to what we store as memory.  Her team employs Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study this, and the supercomputing capabilities at TACC have made possible rapid analysis of collected images from fMRI studies.  The goal is to correlate what we’re thinking about while we’re actually experiencing something new.  

Now for the punch line…

Dr. Preston emphasized that sleep plays an important role in stabilizing memories. Experiences are replayed during sleep, which makes memory stronger.  Test subjects show fewer errors on things queued during naptime and thus allowed to bolster the relevant neurons.  Sleep facilitates the gist of an idea, insights, and inferences.  Our memories anticipate, go beyond actual experiences, are ever changing, and actually need enough sleep to accomplish their tasks.  So, the next time you decide to “sleep on” a decision, know that you have a scientific basis for doing so.  And know also that all-nighters prior to an exam have very little effect.

The implications of Dr. Preston’s studies go beyond basic understanding and apply to educational practice, and a whole new field of legal practice known as Neurolaw.  Your honor, my Hippocampus is to blame, not me…

<image of Dr. Preston from Austin Forum site>

<image of Hippocampus from Wikipedia>