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 NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person you are recommending the page to knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. We do not capture any email address. ||||| It’s clear that your working memory — which holds attention on small things of short-term importance — works, or you wouldn’t be able to remember a new phone number long enough to dial it. 
 
 Describing how it works, however — how the brain determines what to keep in mind, and what to set aside but keep handy for quick access — is a work in progress. Work that may sharpen our theory of the mind and even help people suffering from schizophrenia or depression. 
 
 “A lot of mental illness is associated with the inability to choose what to think about,” says Brad Postle , a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “What we’re taking are first steps toward looking at the mechanisms that give us control over what we think about.” 
 
 Postle’s lab is challenging the idea that working memory remembers things through sustained brain activity. They caught brains tucking less-important information away somewhere beyond the reach of the tools that typically monitor brain activity — and then they snapped that information back into active attention with magnets. 
 
 Their latest study will be published Dec. 2 in the journal Science. 
 
 According to Postle, it’s important to note that most people feel they are able to concentrate on a lot more than their working memory can actually hold. It’s a bit like vision, in which it feels like we’re seeing everything in our field of view, but details slip away unless you re-focus on them regularly. 
 
 “The notion that you’re aware of everything all the time is a sort of illusion your consciousness creates,” says Postle. “That is true for thinking, too. You have the impression that you’re thinking of a lot of things at once, holding them all in your mind. But lots of research shows us you’re probably only actually attending to — are conscious of in any given moment — just a very small number of things.” 
 
 Postle’s group conducted a series of experiments in which people were asked to remember two items representing different types of information (they used words, faces and directions of motion) because they’d be tested on their memories. 
 
 When the researchers gave their subjects a cue as to the type of question coming — a face, for example, instead of a word — the electrical activity and blood flow in the brain associated with the word memory disappeared. But if a second cue came letting the subject know they would now be asked about that word, the brain activity would jump back up to a level indicating it was the focus of attention. 
 
 “People have always thought neurons would have to keep firing to hold something in memory. Most models of the brain assume that,” says Postle. “But we’re watching people remember things almost perfectly without showing any of the activity that would come with a neuron firing. The fact that you’re able to bring it back at all in this example proves it’s not gone. It’s just that we can’t see evidence for its active retention in the brain.” 
 
 The researchers were also able to bring the seemingly abandoned items back to mind without cueing their subjects. Using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to apply a focused electromagnetic field to a precise part of the brain involved in storing the word, they could trigger the sort of brain activity representative of focused attention. 
 
 Furthermore, if they cued their research subjects to focus on a face (causing brain activity associated with the word to drop off), a well-timed pulse of transcranial magnetic stimulation would snap the stowed memory back into attention, and prompt the subjects to incorrectly think that they had been cued to focus on the word. 
 
 “We think that memory is there, but not active,” says Postle, whose work is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health. “More than just showing us it’s there, the TMS can actually make that memory temporarily active again.” 
 
 The study — conducted by Postle with Nathan Rose, a former UW–Madison postdoctoral researcher who is now a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, and UW–Madison graduate students in psychology and neuroscience — suggests a state of memory apart from the spotlight attention of active working memory and the deep storage of more significant things in long-term memory. 
 
 “What’s still unknown here is how the brain determines what falls away, and what enables you to retrieve things in the short-term if you need them,” Postle says. 
 
 Studying how the brain apportions attention could eventually influence the way we understand and treat mental health disorders such as schizophrenia, in which patients focus on hallucinations instead of reality, and depression, which seems strongly related to spending an unhealthy amount of time dwelling on negative things. 
 
 “We are making some interesting progress with very basic research,” says Postle. “But you can picture a point at which this work could help people control their attention, choose what they think about, and manage or overcome some very serious problems associated with a lack of control.” ||||| Zap! Magnet Study Offers Fresh Insights Into How Memory Works 
 
 Enlarge this image Fanatic Studio/Collection Mix: Sub/Getty Images Fanatic Studio/Collection Mix: Sub/Getty Images 
 
 Forget where you just left your car keys? A magnetic pulse might help you remember. 
 
 Some dormant memories can be revived by delivering a pulse of magnetic energy to the right brain cells, researchers report Thursday in the journal Science. 
 
 The finding is part of a study that suggests the brain's "working memory" system is far less volatile than scientists once thought. 
 
 "This changes how we think about the structure of working memory and the processes that support it," says Nathan Rose, a neurocognitive psychologist studying memory at the University of Notre Dame and one of the authors of the research. 
 
 Working memory, he explains, is what allows the brain to retain a new piece of information even when our attention is temporarily directed elsewhere. 
 
 Say you're at a cocktail party, for example. You meet two people, learn their names, and start a conversation. As you talk, the conversation shifts to just one of those people. 
 
 "But you don't want to forget who the other person is, in case the conversation shifts back," Rose says. And, usually, you don't forget, because your brain has been keeping the name in working memory — ready to use at a moment's notice. 
 
 Since the 1950s, the dominant theory about working memory has been that it required continuous activity in the brain cells associated with a particular item, like someone's name. If the activity level dropped, the memory was gone forever, scientists figured. 
 
 But Rose and a team of researchers weren't so sure. So they did a series of experiments. 
 
 In one, people watched a screen while researchers monitored the activity in their brains. 
 
 "We presented two items — like a face and a word," Rose says. The participants were told they needed to remember both. 
 
 That caused a distinct pattern of activity in two groups of brain cells: one that was keeping track of the face and another that was keeping track of the word. 
 
 But then, Rose says, the researchers had people focus on just one of the items they'd seen. And when they did that, the brain activity associated with the other item disappeared. 
 
 "It was almost as if the item had been forgotten," Rose says. 
 
 But it wasn't forgotten. When prompted, the participants were able to retrieve their memory of the item. And that caused the associated brain cells to start firing again. 
 
 Then the researchers provided an even more dramatic demonstration. They used transcranial magnetic stimulation (via an electromagnetic coil held to the forehead) to deliver a pulse of energy to the brain. 
 
 "And when we did that, we saw a brief reactivation of the unattended memory item, as if it was brought back into focal attention," Rose says. The technique only worked, though, if people believed they would need to remember the item at some later time. 
 
 This ability to revive a thought with a magnetic pulse quickly became known as "the Frankenstein effect" among scientists in the lab, Rose says. 
 
 The results offer strong evidence that brain cells don't have to remain active to sustain a working memory, Rose says. But he's concerned that the public will assume magnetic stimulation can help them recover memories. 
 
 "Boy, wouldn't that be great?" he says. "But I think we're a ways away from that." 
 
 What's closer, though, is a better understanding of how short-term memory works. 
 
 The study strongly suggests that working memories can be stored by changing the connections among neurons, says Joel Voss, a brain scientist at Northwestern University who was not involved in the research 
 
 "If you imagine that a particular set of connections can represent a memory, then that set of connections could be reconfigured," he says. "And it could stay in that configuration, even if the neurons aren't persistently active." 
 
 Scientists believe that's how long-term memories are stored. And if some short-term memories also use this mechanism, it could explain how they can become long-term memories. 
 
 "In order for a long-term memory to happen there has to be some physical trace of that memory," he says. And that's exactly what the study seems to have found.
– Scientists have a new theory about how the brain processes memories, one that holds the promise—someday—of helping those with depression and other mental illnesses. The study out of the University of Wisconsin focused on working memory, which covers immediate stuff like new phone numbers or where we left our car keys. The prevailing theory on this type of memory has long been that the information disappears if a person tucks it away and doesn't think about it for a while. But the researchers found that the memory does, in fact, remain stored in the brain and can be essentially zapped back into play through magnetic stimulation to specific cells, they report in Science. No, this doesn't mean that a brain zapper is in the offing to help you remember stuff, but researchers say the implications are still potentially large. "This changes how we think about the structure of working memory and the processes that support it," says co-author Nathan Rose, per NPR. Another researcher, Brad Postle, explains why this could be a big deal down the road for those suffering from illnesses such as schizophrenia. "A lot of mental illness is associated with the inability to choose what to think about," he says. "What we’re taking are first steps toward looking at the mechanisms that give us control over what we think about." It's still a long way off, but the general idea would be to help people redirect their focus; in the case of schizophrenics, that would involve shifting from hallucinations to reality. (Apparently pretty faces can help memory, too.)