In modifying places in which we spend thousands of hours: our homes, schools, places of work and leisure – we exert more power than any other species in shaping our own brains.

Iterative cycles of human brains adapting to environments and environments being adapted by human brains have enabled our species to thrive in a wider variety of ecological niches than any other mammal across the length and breadth of the entire globe. Of vital importance to our adaptability is the emergence of cognitive faculties enabling us to circumvent the painstakingly slow processes involved in evolutionary change that drive behavioural adaptations in most other multicellular species.

Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands, for example, had to wait for many generations to evolve a useful adaptation that conferred a survival advantage over their competitors. This is because the vast majority of genetic mutations do not yield any useful, adaptive characteristics. For genetic mutation(s) to result in, say, a beak of appropriate dimensions to access an otherwise inaccessible food source, a great many decades of annual mating must pass before this random process eventually hits the jackpot.

Humans confronted with a similar scenario would likely invent a tool to access the food in question. Offspring, or anyone else for that matter, could then mimic the movements necessary to successfully make and manipulate the tool. This is all thanks to “mirror” neurons, which provide us with our natural ability to convert observed movements into movements that we perform ourselves (In his TED talk VS Ramachandran describes the importance of mirror neurons quite beautifully). Behavioural adaptation through tool use is thus not, unlike genetic adaptation, limited to being spread down through subsequent generations.

Humans are not the only creature to use tools. New Caledonian crows are top of the pecking order when it comes to birds intelligent enough to use tools. They use a variety of different tools and in the appropriate sequential order, to obtain a food reward that would otherwise be beyond their reach. Each bird is clever enough to figure this out for themselves, or at least to learn from others, but their capacity to propagate this information beyond their immediate habitat is prohibited by a lack of sufficiently sophisticated communication tools.

Chimpanzees strip the leaves off of long straight sticks to use the resulting tool as a means to “fish” for termites in a termite mound. However, as E. O. Wilson famously pointed out: non-human primates do not have the necessary intelligence to prepare a neat stack of fishing sticks the night before. Non-human species only make and use tools as and when they are needed. In more recent times exceptions to this rule have been observed.

It was long thought that we humans were the only species with sufficient foresight to predict the need for certain tools in the future and to prepare them in advance. However a chimpanzee residing in a Scandinavian zoo turned this assumption on its head by building a stack of stones in the morning to hurl at visitors later on once the zoo had opened to the public!

That said, we still enjoy the unique status of being the only species able to share knowledge of making and using tools through verbal or written communication. This has propagated knowledge of all sorts of tools way beyond our own communities, to other members of our species across the entire globe – eliminating the need to reinvent the wheel and build upon the creativity of others.

In addition to these monthly brainblogs you can catch my daily #braintweet several times a day by following me on Twitter.

My most recent major project consisted of 26 x 30 min episodes of a brand new flagship series for Discovery Science made by REEF TV called “The Tech Show“; probably best described as a Tomorrow’s World for the 21st Century.
The Tech Show showcases the latest breakthroughs in science, technology and engineering. My personal favourites include the super-geek who creates tornados in his garage, the Red Bull pilot who can do a loop-the-loop in a helicopter, the sand lizard who escapes predators by sending travelling waves down the length of its body to burrow, in the blink of an eye, into densely compacted sand and the robot that can track and catch fast moving objects. This series is currently being broadcast across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Last year I got my own strand on ITV’s This Morning called “Don’t be a Slave to your Brain.” A fantastic opportunity to showcase ways to improve our memory, decision making and strategies for keeping the symptoms of dementia at bay for as long as possible.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of doing live television and was amazed that my first 10 min appearance resulted in a 33% increase in Twitter followers! Talks are ongoing about bringing this strand back again, even bigger and better by committing a camera crew to accompany me in an investigation of the latest brain research, at some point over the course of 2012.

Last year I also finally managed to get a foot in the door at Channel 4 by contributing to two primetime series:

In “The Secret Life of Buildings“ I used EEG to measure the brain activity from the grey matter of none other than Tom Dyckhoff, The Independent’s architecture critic, whilst he tried to pen an article in an open plan office. We demonstrated that, even when unaware of surrounding distractions, like movement in your field of vision or noises/conversations in the nearby environment, the brain nonetheless diverts precious resources away from thinking to process them.

The other Channel 4 series was Tony Robinson’s dramatic reconstructions of historical accounts of “Gods and Monsters.” My role was to discuss how modern neuroscience would account for the symptoms that people exhibited when accused of being possessed by the devil.

I also tried my hand at providing some neuroscience-informed romance tips regarding how to make a good impression during a date for MTV‘s “PLAIN JANE.” Predictably enough, any mention of brain areas vital for human bonding, neurohormones involved in sex drive, love and long term bonding etc. hit the cutting room floor. However my contribution to the first series was deemed worthy of an invitation to participate in the second series so this time I’m going to try even harder to make the brain stuff interesting and relevant enough to make the cut!!

I first got involved in television as a science consultant (and later featured actor) in Emmy Award-winning, feature-length, biology documentary “Inside the Living Body” made by PIONEER PRODUCTIONS as a co-production for Channel 4 and National Geographic.

My first break in presenting came shortly after receiving my PhD from University College London, when OBJECTIVE PRODUCTIONS offered me a role as a presenter performing secretly-filmed social psychology experiments on unsuspecting members of the public for 20 x 1 hour-long episodes of “People Watchers” for BBC2.

This was followed by a strand on ITV’s THIS MORNING called “Teen Club” where I was called upon to explain exactly what goes on inside the adolescent brain.

I then put my science consultancy hat back on to help develop two television series: one for Silver River and another for Tigress Productions.

I then contributed some talking heads material for LIBERTY BELL PRODUCTIONS on the subject of sexual attraction in “How To Get More Sex” which aired at primetime on ITV.

In 2008, the Institute of Engineering and Technology decided to modernise their Faraday lectures by commissioning 4 x 15 minute films about “Technology for Life” which won gold at the International Video Communications Association awards. As the Face of Faraday 2008 I presented these films, made by HAWKSHEAD/RADLEY YELDAR, and also several live events all across the UK, produced by SHINING WIT. The aim was to promote Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths in the eyes of 12-16 year old children… a cause very close to my heart.

Teacher’s TV were so impressed with the quality of these BAFTA award-nominated films that they decided to buy the rights to air the films on their channel.

Whilst doing post-doctoral fMRI brain scanning research at the Max Planck Insitute for Biological Cybernetics, I used some of my spare time to provide consultancy services to help develop a documentary for BLINK FILMS.

During this period I also consulted for TIGER ASPECT PRODUCTIONS in the design of scientifically-rigorous games for the Channel 5 quiz “Britain’s Best Brain” presented by Zoe Ball and Jamie Theakston.

Upon my return from Germany, I immediatly started filming for “Naked Britain“, made by CARBON PRODUCTIONS for Sky One – my first solo presenting job.

A further series “BODY LANGUAGE SECRETS” a.k.a. “How To Get What You Want“, also made by CARBON PRODUCTIONS has aired on Sky One, Sky Two and Sky Three throughout 2010 and has been repeated throughout 2011 and 2012. My role was to help explain what goes on in our brains during a wide range of human behaviours: from love and attraction to money and power.

In addition to these regular brainposts you can catch my #braintweets by following me on Twitter.

I kicked off by describing some of the features of modern life that are “Enemies to Creativity.” Last year I contributed to a Channel 4 architecture series called “The Secret Life of Buildings” to illustrate, using EEG, that the brain responds to distractions in a typical, modern, work environment – the open plan office – whether or not you are consciously aware of them. The presenter, The Independent architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff (left), was wired up with an electrode studded scrum cap and plonked in the middle of a busy open plan office to write up an overdue newspaper article. When a colleague (to his left in the photograph) mentioned the word “pub,” an extensive burst of activity was triggered across his prefrontal cortices (pictured top right). The point is although we might not consciously register sights and sounds that are constantly being picked up by our senses, they are nonetheless processed in the brain, which diverts precious resources away from the task at hand.

This is relevant to the process of creativity because soaking up and considering vast quantities of information from a variety of sources for a prolongued period of time is often the first step towards solving a tricky problem and this requires sustained attention. And it is not just disturbances in our open plan working environments (classrooms fall into this category too, of course) that pull the brain’s attentional resources hither and thither, thus disrupting the intake of information. The demands made on us by our smartphones constantly alerting us to the arrival of endless emails, texts, calls and social networking updates also interferes with creative thinking.

The first tip for boosting creativity is thus to block out distractions by switching off smartphones, closing down email accounts and sticking in the earplugs. Take a tip from french polymath Henry Pointcaré and work in regular two hour sessions from 10:00-12:00 and 17:00-19:00 to get those distraction-free bouts of unbroken concentration in. That way you will be able to take in all the necessary input relevant to the problem at hand. Later, once the subconscious brain has mulled over the possibilities, circumventing the inevitable mental blocks, your Eureka moment will come when you least expect it.

Great thinkers have typically reached their big creative breakthroughs, usually described in the scientific literature as “Aha! moments,” at a time when they were not thinking terribly hard. For instance, Henry Pointcaré cracked one of his biggest mathematical conundrums whilst stepping onto a bus, Kekulé day-dreamed a snake biting its tail to crack the chemical structure of benzene whilst dozing by the fire and Archimedes was famously plonking himself in the bath.

The point is that when a “mental impasse” is reached i.e. you’ve done lots of work on trying to crack the problem, but don’t seem to be getting anywhere – the best thing you can possibly do is walk away from it and do something else. You must leave it to your subconscious to play with all the information you have furiously uploaded into your brain and wait for the solution to percolate up into consciousness once you are between thoughts.

The rest of the talk describes a medley of the latest neuroscientific investigations into the Aha! moment courtesy of the likes of Joydeep Bhattacharya and colleageues at Goldsmith’s University. They discovered that the moment that a problem is solved is associated with activation across the right prefrontal cortex up to 8s before the person registers their response.

I also touch upon Alan Snyder and colleage’s contraversial experiment where transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) was used to transiently deactivate brain areas over the left anterior temporal/prefrontal areas whilst stimulating right anterior temporal/prefrontal areas resulting in three-fold improvements in finding solutions to creative problems. The idea is based on the theory that, in most right handed people, the left brain controls well rehearsed over-learned behaviours, whilst the right brain is more involved in grappling with novel stimuli and generating creative behaviour.

Finally, I described what modern science knows about the hypnagogic state, where wakefulness drifts off into sleep, well know to be an incredibly fertile ground for creativity. Scientist and engineer Thomas Edison was a great believer in using the hypnagogic state to boost creativity and given his 1,093 patents and inventions that lead to electric lighting, plus the music and movie industries, I would say that his is a testimony we can all believe.

Clues as to how and why this brain state is so enormously innovative arise from very recent studies (Magnin et al, 2010) in which electrodes attached all over the surface of a human brain to measure the neuronal activity as a person falls asleep. This has revealed that the thalamus – the brain’s main junction box through which all parts of the cortex are connected to all other parts – “falls asleep” first whilst other brain areas “switch off” up to 5mins, 10mins, 15 mins and even 20 mins later! Until then these brain areas are still firing away, yet cut off as they from the rest of the brain by the absence of viable cortico-thalmo-cortical connectivity, it is surely this dissociation which leads to those magical sparkles of insight?

Edison even invented a clever device for capturing creative thoughts before they are forgotten. If you want to know more about this then you can click here to book me in to give this talk at your school, university or firm!

If you’d like to leave a comment below, please do, but so that I can find it amongst all the spam comments would you please email me to tell me on what day and at what time you left it so that I can find and approve it.

In addition to these brainblogs you can also follow my regular #braintweets by following me (@DrJackLewis) on Twitter.

If you pause the video after about 2-3s you can see the status of the brain in the mid-teens – it is quite literally suspended half way between the adult and child form – some brain areas have fully matured by this point in life (blue), but there is a vast patchwork of reds, yellows and greens indicating many brain areas that are still in their childlike form. If you re-start the video you’ll notice right at the end the very last brain area to go from “almost mature” green to “fully mature” blue is at the front of the brain, within the prefrontal cortex. The dorsolateral part of the prefrontal cortex (the upper side parts of the brain region residing behind your forehead) is responsible for impulse control in the mature fully developed brain.

Adults who have brain damage in areas of the prefrontal cortex lose their ability to control their anger – reacting in a highly aggressive manner at the slightest provocation. Remind you of anyone? When the hormones of adolescence are running riot, teenagers can often find themselves in situations that induce feelings of helplessness and frustration, which invariably finds expression as anger. This happens because prefrontal brain areas that are used to exert control over impulsive behaviours in adults are not yet fully developed. The important thing to remember is that late development of these important brain areas is not necessarily a mistake and may not, frustrating as it may be for the poor, long-suffering parents, be a bad thing. The inability of teens to control their aggression and arguments that their crankiness causes may actually help to break reliance on parental support, encouraging them to test the waters of independence in preparation for independent adult life.

In addition to these brainblogs you can follow Dr Jack on Twitter to catch his daily #braintweet.

“Dr Jack’s presentation was thought-provoking and engaging. With great clarity he reviewed the core functions of the brain and the implications for us as professional in terms of motivating student to learn. He provided both teaching and support staff with very useful, practical tips for engaging students and helping them “boost their brain power”.

Dr Jack also ran a brilliant workshop for students who took on board the messages he gave them about how to learn, revise and generally get ready for their GCSEs in the most effective way. Feedback from students collecting their examination results in the Summer highlighted the impact he had had on their attitudes to learning and their preparation. Indeed, a number said that they had gone into the exams feeling much more confident about how to show what they knew. They were certainly inspired!”

Understanding the hidden processes at work deep inside our brains as we acquire skills and learn a wide variety of information helps to motivate people, whether young or old, to stick to their guns for long enough to make a difference.

Being able to visualise the very brain areas that are physically changed by the cumulative mental exertion across many hundreds of hours can really capture the imagination of young minds – making the imperceptible, and often frustratingly gradual, improvements that their efforts ultimately result in, much more tangible.

A firm grasp of the key ingredients required to make a memory truly stick in the neural networks dedicated to storing and recalling information is captured by a variety of mnemonic techniques that make revision more fun, more effective and less of a grind.

And the 10 Brain Optimisation Principles (BOPs) that top and tail every Brain Coach Live presentation provide hints and tips that help everyone in the audience keep their brain firing on all cyclinders each and every day, for the rest of their lives.

On Tues 7th February 2012 I will be giving a Brain Coach Live talk at London’s Dulwich College as part of a new Buy One Get One Free Buddy Scheme (“BOGOF Buddy Scheme”) launched this year to enable all schools to get Brain Coach Live in front of their pupils.

This  system simply allows any school who chooses to book a Brain Coach Live presentation at their school to elect another nearby school where the very same talk will be given for free. The concept is based on the idea that fee-paying schools, more likely to have funds for such extra-curricular activities, might cover costs both for themselves and a local non-fee paying school as a gesture of good will.

Dulwich College have chosen Kingsdale Foundation as their Buddy School, which was featured in episode 2 of Channel 4′s “The Secret Life of Buildings” to showcase its innovative architecture. So I’m particularly glad to be giving a talk at Kingsdale so that I can see for myself how their innovative use of space helps the school to function better.

Coincidentally, this was exactly the same episode which I contributed to by performing an EEG experiment in an open plan office to demonstrate how our brains are constantly processing the sensory distractions around us regardless of whether we are aware of it or not!

If your school would like me to come and give this talk I would be more than happy to consider your application. To get in touch please email me by clicking here.

If you wish to leave a comment below it would be happily received but you must also email me to let me know you have done this immediately afterwards. The reason for this is that I have lost the battle against the spambots. I currently have 15,000 comments waiting for approval and it simply takes too much time to go through them all to find the 1 in 200 that was actually generated by a real human being. So long as you email me to let me know what time your comment was posted I can identify and approve it straight away.

In addition to these regular brainposts you can get my daily #braintweets, which draw attention to recent breakthroughs in brain science and related subjects, by following me on Twitter.

The best setting for your personal memory palace should look nothing like this! It should be a place in your real life that you know like the back of your hand.

There are a wide variety of mnemonic techniques that have been developed over the centuries, some more sophisticated than others. The first memory trick I was ever gifted was: “Richard-Of-York-Gave-Battle-In-Vain” which my primary school teacher taught the class to help us remember the order of the colours of the rainbow.

The first memory trick I ever made up, aged 14 or so, was “purple cof gas” – a memorable mnemonic for me personally because it conjoured up an image of Batman being knocked out with a big plume of noxious, magenta vapours spewing from the tip of the Joker’s umbrella. It was a vivid way to remember some relatively dull facts for when my biology exam came around: the system of  classification for living organisms. Every one knows about the Kingdoms, we’ve all heard of the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom etc. But Purple COF GaS enabled me to remember, even now 18 years later, that the correct order for the rest of the classification system was: Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. I had a test that asked about the classification system on several occasions over the years and it was Batman and the Joker that helped me get full marks in that part of the exam everytime, effortlessly…

A useful little trick, but not terribly sophisticated or flexible.  The “Memory Palace,” on the other hand, has been exploited since the Romans and Ancient Greeks. A time when poets were expected to recite 5-hour long poems from memory, word-for-word, or end up meeting an untimely demise.

It involves using a personal “Memory Palace” based on a real place that you know like the back of your hand. Each room is visited sequentially and each place and/or piece of furniture within that room visited in a specific order. This provides a mental framework in which to-be-remembered items can be “placed” to enable perfect recall when the journey is repeated in the imagination. However I’ll return to the Memory Palace at a later date in favour of explaining in more detail one that is fantastic for remembering a simple list. A list of historical events, a shopping list, a list of names, a list of points to be raised in a meeting – whatever you like. If you want a way of memorising a list so you can bring the items to mind in exactly the right order, then what I call the chain mnemonic is a great starting point.

The chain mnemonic involves vividly imagining multisensory “pairs” of memories in a manner that creates successive links between one item and the next to form a chain. I’ll walk you through an example to demonstrate how useful it can be in retaining lists of information that must be recalled in a specific order. Lets say for instance that you wanted to commit to memory every team that has won a football World Cup since its inauguration (in reverse chronological order):

Spain (2010)

Italy (2006)

Brazil (2002)

France (1998)

Brazil (1994)

West Germany (1990)

Argentina (1986)

Italy (1982)

Argentina (1978)

West Germany (1974)

Brazil (1970)

England (1966)

Brazil (1962)

Brazil (1958)

West Germany (1954)

Uruguay (1950)

Italy (1938)

Italy (1934)

Uruguay (1930)

The first challenge is to dream up a memory for the first link in the chain i.e. using your imagination to make an association between Spain and Italy that is personal to you. You create a symbolic representation in your mind’s eye for each of the two countries and then you combine them. Simple. When I personally think of Spain I think of bullfighting and matadors. When I think of Italy I think of pasta. So to create an unforgettable link between the two I imagined an action-packed, movie-esque scene with lots of bullfights and spaghetti:

Link number 1 in the chain: Spain (2010) –> Italy (2006)

A bull gushing blood (emotionally charged – shocking, disgusting etc) is charging towards the matador (fear, horror) at the centre of the bull ring. The light is glittering off his garishly decorated outfit (visual sense), the crowd is roaring their approval (auditory sense), there is an overpowering stench of sweat, dust and blood (olfactory sense), but at the moment the bull reaches the matador I realise (horrified) that the cape he is weilding is not made out of cloth, but of strands of spaghetti (emotion: strange, bizarre, worrying – HE’s GOING TO DIE!!).

Mnemonic link 1: a bullfight (Spain) that results in an explosion of spaghetti (Italy)

The matador’s sword delivers the final death blow at the moment that the bull’s horns strike the cape – ripping it to shreds and sending an explosion of spaghetti up into the air (highly exaggerated bizarre image – see left – almost like something out of a cartoon). As the bull dies it’s twitching and tossing sends more and more spaghetti into the air. This is the key image that successfully intertwines the concept of Spain with Italy – the convulsing bull spreading unfathomable quantities of spaghetti all over the bull ring. Picture this vividly, emotionally and in a multisensory fashion and you will never forget it. The spaghetti splatters the matador from head to toe, it flies high up into the sky and showers down upon the noisy crowd who are finding the spectacle hilarious (emotion: bizarre, unreal). This might seem unnecessarily elaborate, weird and harrowing – but this is what makes the memory memorable. Matador/bull = Spain (winners of the 2010 World Cup). Spaghetti covering the whole bull ring = Italy (winners of the 2006 World Cup). We have successfully created the first link in the chain. Now we have to create the second link in the chain.

Second link in the chain: Italy (2006) –> Brazil (2002)

As I’ve mentioned, it is really important for these memories to be relevant to you personally. For me, something that sticks out in my mind about Brazil is that Brasilians absolutely love to eat barbequed chicken hearts. When I first set eyes on a skewer of chicken hearts it turned my stomach (but as with many things, I ended up loving them in the end). I find piggybacking my mnemonic symbol for Brazil onto a real memory THE most effective way to make it stick. The emotionally-potent real event that I’m think of is when a waiter came over to our table in a Churrascaria (Brasilian restaurant where the waiters constantly circulate with hot meat fresh off the barbeque) with a disgusting-looking skewer of 40 or so chicken hearts. I was coerced into trying it and I’ll never forget seeing the waiter saw ten or so frazzled chicken hearts onto my plate. Everyone must find their own symbolic representations that are emotionally charged and inextricably linked to the item that you’re trying to remember, but the charred chicken heart episode is my personal symbol of Brazil (disgulpa!).

Mnemonic link 2: Ronaldinho serving BBQ chicken hearts (Brazil) onto a plate of pasta (Italy)

So link number 2, at least in my World Cup chain mnemonic, involves our matador, starving hungry (emotional drive) after a long and arduous bullfight (he’s exhausted), scooping up an armful of spaghetti from the floor all covered in blood and dust (disgusting) and plonking it on a plate at a table that has been ceremonially placed at the very centre of the bull ring. As Ronaldinho (a very famous Brazilian footballer for those who don’t follow soccer) dressed as a very formal waiter (bizarre spectacle) with his big goofy teeth (emotion: humorous) approaches the table wielding a skewer of chicken hearts in one hand (emotion: disgusting, stomach turning) and a big knife in the other (emotion: threatening).

He politely bows to the matador who signals that he wants some hearts on his plate and so Ronaldinho saws off every single chicken heart one by one onto the top of the pile of spaghetti. This is the image that forms the core of link 2: a big knife wielded by a slightly deranged-looking Brasilian footballer (scary/funny), cutting many more chicken hearts than you could ever eat in a lifetime from a BBQ skewer (disgusting) which tumble down the sides of the big pile of dusty bloody oily pasta glistening in the sun (unappetising). We have now created link number 2: Pasta = Italy (winners of 2006 World Cup) and Ronaldinho depositing chicken hearts onto the plate = Brazil (winners of 2002 World Cup).

This process continues all the way through the list. Link number 3 in the chain: Brazil –> France, for me, would involve a revolting scene whereby some of the chicken hearts sprout antennae and start crawling off the plate and leave disgusting looking slug trails all over the table. Chicken hearts are about the same size as a snail and not-dissimilar in texture, so the main image here is the chicken heart (symbol of Brazil) miraculously metamorphosising into a snail (symbol of France).

Once a chain of mnemonics has been imagined and elaborated: linking item 1 to 2, item 2 to 3 all the way to the end of the list – it must be revisited. Shut your eyes and imagine the sequence of events from link 1 to 2 to 3 and if you get stuck re-rehearse the transitions that you’re not remembering well. I cannot emphasise enough how important this step is. Focus on isolating weaknesses in the chain and making them more memorable by imaging more disgusting, horrifying, inappropriate or erotic (yes erotic – if it’s risque you’ll remember it even better) scenes and/or adding more imagined sensory information to the scenario to ensure perfect recall. From time-to-time you will have to change the symbolic representation for an item so that it fits into the flow of your chosen narrative, or you might have to change the story a little bit to make it work. Once these imperfections in recall have been identified and fixed, you’ll find that you can roll off the list of items no problem in no time at all – amazing your friends, family and colleagues with your gob-smackingly-good memory.

It may seem like a lot of effort to begin with. However, as with all things (see here for more) the more time you spend experimenting with your imagination the faster, better and more efficiently you’ll be able to create and recall the memories. After a while you’ll be able to sit down for 10 minutes with your list of to-be-remembered items, be it a shopping list, or points that you want to raise in a meeting or during a presentation without using prompts, and you’ll nail it every time.

MEMORY AND THE BRAIN – going deeper into HOW and WHY these mnemonics work so well…

The successful creation of memories relies upon a densely packed and highly interconnected network of brain cells called the hippocampus residing deep within the temporal lobes.

We know that the hippocampus is vital for the formation and retention of memories because when it is damaged, by oxygen starvation resulting from ischaemic or haemorrhagic stroke, encephalitis, certain types of epilepsy or Alzheimer’s disease, people become amnesic.

The hippocampus is so named because if you take cross-sectional slices of the temporal lobes, which run horizontally along the left and right sides of the brain, it looks like a seahorse (In greek “Hippo” means “horse” and “campus” means “sea”).

The hippocampus nestles inside the medial or “inward” facing part of the temporal lobe, which is a key component of the emotion-producing limbic system. So the first tip to creating memories that are easily and effectively recalled is to ensure that they incorporate some kind of potent emotion. More on this later.

The hippocampus is also highly connected to all sensory areas. Visual brain areas at the back and underside of the brain that make sense of the light that strikes the retina at the back of the eyeball feed into the hippocampus. Auditory brain areas on the upper portion of the temporal lobes that create the sounds that we hear send millions of neuronal tendrils through the hippocampus. Touch information coarses down from somatosensory areas located within regions of the parietal cortex right at the top of the brain. Tastes feed in from brain stem regions involved in processing chemical stimulation of the tongues taste buds. And smells feed directly in from the olfactory bulb directly above the nasal cavity. Consequently, the second tip for creating memories that are swiftly and faithfully recalled is to make them multisensory. So with any mnemonic strategy you must commit items to memory not just by imagining what it would look like, but also what would it sound like, smell like, feel like and taste like too. This makes them much easier to recall than unisensory memories – those that exploit only one sense. This is because multisensory memories are embedded not only in connections from the different sensory areas to the memory forming and recalling hippocampus, but also in connections between the different sensory areas. Multisensory memories are more powerful than the sum of their parts.

Emotionally-labelled memories are given special priority treatment when it comes to recall because the amygdala, a structure densely connected with the hippocampus and residing at the tips of the medial temporal lobe, becomes activated when the brain is processing emotionally-significant information, imprinting it with HIGH STATUS. The amygdala is most famously involved in the fear response, in which it responds to sensory information indicative of a threat to life and limb, by mobilising body and brain to fight or flee the danger. More recently it has been discovered that it becomes activated by stimuli that induce positive as well as negative emotions, so long as they are potent. Presumably the reason that the mechanism for making emotional inducing stimuli and events more memorable evolved is because, for the event or scene to have produced a strongly positive or negative emotional response, then it is likely to be useful to be able to recall it in the future to guide our behaviour.

So, bear THIS in mind: when dreaming up these mnemonics…

• a disgusting scene such as someone you know vomiting in front of you
• a funny scenario that makes you feel genuinely amused inside
• or, perhaps, an “inappropriate” scenario such as walking in on your boss, your teacher or your parents having sex

…will be much more effective in ensuring recall than emotionally-neutral scenes. Don’t forget: as well as being multisensory in nature, your imagined scenarios must be emotionally-charged.

If you find this useful and/or interesting it would be really great if you could take the time to write a comment. I don’t get paid for this and it’s very time consuming. I do it because I’m passionate about the brain and want to share this passion with the world. So prove yourself to be one of the determined few who got right the way through to the end and please do me a favour by letting me know you’re there and leaving a comment.

All the best and enjoy expanding your mnemonic abilities, DrJ

You can also see Dr Jack’s daily #braintweets by following him on Twitter.

If you liked this post and wish to leave a comment please also drop me an email to help me locate your feedback within the sea of spambot comments to approve your one. I’d be really grateful if you would take a few moments to let me know what you found most interesting  / useful plus any suggestions for future blogs.

Dramatic reconstructions of our ancestors' superstitious beliefs in a great new series

This brain post has been written to complement a recent appearance on Tony Robinson’s brilliant new Channel 4 series. Monsters and Demons (watch now on 4OD) investigates our ancestors’ belief in the supernatural through a series of dramatic reconstuctions of recorded historical events. In episode 2 (Sat 3^rd Dec 2011) Tony and I discussed how, in times before modern medical knowledge had figured out the facts and made them broadly available to all, certain forms of epileptic seizure could easily have been mistakenly attributed to evil spirits. In particular, temporal lobe epilepsy (these days better known as complex partial seizure disorder) can trigger vivid, sometimes deeply distressing hallucinations. Tonic-clonic seizures, a very common symptom of several different forms of epilepsy, often leads to involuntary production of grotesque-looking and often extremely powerful bodily contortions that, in times of old, could easily have been mistaken for possession by malevolent spirits .

Hyperexcitability in vunerable brain areas produce synchronised pulses of electrical activity which can spread across the brain

The human brain is a massively interconnected, intricately woven ball of cellular wires that under normal circumstances sends millions of electrical signals buzzing through billions of interconnected networks. For this to result in purposeful thought, perception and feeling, split second control over the rate at which electrical messages travel along each brain cell is required to allow orderly communication between different brain areas. During an epileptic seizure, powerful surges of electrical signals within a certain vulnerable part of the brain spontaneously begin to synchronise. A positive feedback loop quickly allows this epicentre of activity to force adjacent patches of brain tissue into the same dangerous rhythm. Very quickly this process of “kindling” can begin to overpowers the usual checks and balances inherent in the molecular design of synapses (the site of connection between one brain cell and the next) allowing the torrent of hyperexcitable activity to spread throughout the brain like wildfire.

Jack Lewis explaining to Tony Robinson the similarities between the contortions of a possessed person and stages of a typical epileptic seizure

Tony Robison’s brilliant new series explores how our ancestors might have come to believe in magic, Gods and Monsters. Up until a handful of decades ago medicine, and particularly brain medicine, was still riddled with misunderstanding and ignorance. Over the centuries our ancestors would have had little help from doctors when it came to understanding the bizarre and seemingly frightening array of human behaviours that we now know stem from diseases of the brain. And of course for much of mankind’s history, most normal everyday people did not have access to a proper doctor anyway. Instead the masses turned to whatever intellectual authority was available to them in their local community and whether shamans, soothsayers, vicars or priest mankind’s imagination filled in where it’s knowledge got blurry and they inevitably ended up getting sucked into supernatural explanations.

The phenomenon of epilepsy has been recognised since the time of the Romans (and even before). For centuries it was known as the “falling sickness.” However the many different forms of epilepsy weren’t accurately defined until the 20th Century and so in all previous centuries the causes of many forms of epilepsy may well have been misdisagnosed. In the late 19th Century Yorkshireman John Hughlings Jackson finally put medicine on the right track in terms of understanding the true system of cause and effect in epilepsy describing it as a: “sudden, excessive and rapid discharge” of brain cells.

The actress in the demonic possession scene was working from a particularly well-documented historical account and her performance had all the hallmarks of a tonic-clonic seizure. A few seconds of “tonic” stiffening of muscles, causing sudden rigidity throughout the whole body, which often yields a blood-curdling scream as air is forced out of the lungs, is quickly followed by a “clonic” phase where the muscles powerfully and repetitively contract and relax, producing grotesque movements of the face and body.

In the tonic phase of a tonic-clonic seizure all the body's muscles contract simultaneously

Clearly I jumped at the chance to work with a TV legend like Tony Robinson. Particularly as the project seemed to be taking such an ambitious approach to the age-old tradition of re-creating a story from the history books. Then again, perhaps this shouldn’t have come as such a surprise given his excellent pedigree in making various obscure aspects of history accessible to the widest possible audience. That said the last thing I expected to find myself doing that day was assisting a man (whom for a decade had been known to me only as Baldrick) dressed as a Catholic priest in a staged exorcism!

The demoniac resists Rev Robinson's attempts to administer the holy potion

My conclusion from this bizarre experience? I learned that it is much better to find yourself trying to cope with epilepsy in the 21st century. These days most diseases of the brain can be defined fairly rapidly and according to which illness is identified the best available treatments can be instigated – many of which are extremely effective. In the 16th century, however, rather than enabling people struggling with epileptic seizures to get it under control and to help them cope better, the religious authorities of the time opted instead for effectively torturing the afflicted with vile concoctions, toxic fumes and pain in a futile attempt to prise a non-existant demon out. With the benefit of heinsight it is easy to say this now. No doubt were I alive back then, in the absence of a better explanation, I may well have found myself sucked into all the religious fervour like everyone else.

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