How to Get a Better Memory

Ever gone to the movies and forgotten where you parked the car? New research may one day help you improve your memory.

Neuroscientists have demonstrated that they can strengthen memory in patients by stimulating a critical junction in the brain. The finding could lead to a new method for boosting memory in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease.

Neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried says, "The entorhinal cortex is the golden gate to the brain’s memory mainframe. Every visual and sensory experience that we eventually commit to memory funnels through that doorway to the hippocampus. Our brain cells must send signals through this hub in order to form memories that we can later consciously recall."

Meanwhile, men and women remember things differently. A woman’s memory of an experience is less likely to be accurate than a man’s if it was unpleasant and emotionally provocative.

Participants in a new study were shown a variety of images on a computer screen that fell into several categories: "low-arousal" such as scenes of kittens and babies crying, "high-arousal," for example, war photos, and finally, erotic photos.

Psychiatrist Marc Lavoie says, "Our test relied on photos–we found firstly that highly arousing pictures blur women’s capacity to determine whether they’ve seen it before, and secondly that women have a clearer memory of attractive experiences than men." In other words, women are more likely to remember the GOOD things and men to remember the BAD.

fMRI scans revealed more activity in the right hemisphere of women’s brains for the recognition of pleasant pictures–"the opposite of what we witnessed in men," Lavoie says.

Let’s face it: Ever since Adam and Eve, men and women have had different agendas. In Whitley’s Room, just for subscribers, there are now several short (15 min.) discussions by Whitley Strieber on bible verses. One of them is on the opening lines of Genesis (you’ve never heard an interpretation like THIS before)! Another is on the REAL meaning of the "marriage feast at Cana."

In another, Whitley Strieber talks about how the Romans saw Jesus, and uses the gospels and his deep knowledge of Roman history to explain what Jesus meant to them and why they executed him, and why they did it in the precise way that they did.