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The Nature article Recalling the Future reviews the book Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future wherein Harvard’s Moshe Bar reviews cognitive science research about memory.

From the article I learned that there is growing experimental evidence for significant overlap between memory recall and future simulation. This relationship indicates that prediction is one potential reason why memory evolved: prediction is a unifying principle of the brain’s function and predictions are created from memories.

It seems that our minds spend a significant amount of time making predictions. These predictions are often mundane but sometimes they provide useful insight or even a survival advantage in a harsh and dangerous world. As our brains generate detailed pictures of future events, memory plasticity allows us to augment our recalled memories with up-to-date information. This also allows us to make new associations with a basis in past experience.

In a happy juxtaposition, I also watched Nova’s What Are Dreams? on the same weekend that I read the Nature article. That’s where I learned of an interesting twist on the conventional notion that dreaming helps to reinforce memories. I’ve heard before that dreaming may be involved in moving memories from short-term storage to long-term storage. Now it seems that dreams may also be involved in using memories to help us predict.

This idea is expressed here by Harvard’s Robert Stickgold:

…this is all about the function of sleep and the role of dreaming in processing memories, that it refines the memory, it improves the memory, it makes the memory more useful for the future, and so when they come back, they’re going to be better.

My sense is that when we’re asleep and when we’re dreaming, we are actually conscious and figuring out what’s important about what happened to us and how that relates to everything else that’s happened to us in the past and figuring out what that means about our future.

I’ve often thought (as I’ve searched the house for my car keys) that my memory connects my past to my present. But I’m also aware of how often my memories of past experiences help me in new situations—sometimes when circumstances are similar and sometimes when they’re not.

MIT’s Matt Wilson puts prediction in perspective when he highlights the biggest challenge that we face as humans:

…it is the unknown of the future. And in REM, we may have the opportunity to step into that future world with no risk, because the consequences are simply things don’t work out as you might have expected, and then you wake up.

A safe and secure dry run of sorts…

Memory is information about the past but one useful outcome of remembering the past is the more effective predictions of the future. It seems that our brains are constantly involved with making predictions—both while asleep and awake—and that the key component to these predictions is a result of our mind’s ability to remember.

This is a quote from an episode of PBS’s “Human Spark” entitled “So Human, So Chimp“:

Think that new track is dope? Thank dopamine.

people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure

The journal Nature Neuroscience published an article titled “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music” wherein the researchers used PET scans and Functional MRI scans to monitor subject’s brains while listening to music.

Interestingly, they found that one area of the brain is excited with dopamine while anticipating an upcoming moment of a musical piece and another section is excited when actually listening to that piece.

Initially found via Health | Study: Love music? Thank a substance in your brain | Seattle Times.

Watch it on Netflix: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Dogs-Decoded-Nova/70148726

I’m not a huge dog lover these days—something to do with stepping in mess one too many times. Still, I was really fascinated by Dogs Decoded on NOVA.

One of the major themes centered around communication between dogs and humans. There’s the notion that humans have a left-gaze bias when reading the emotions of other humans. Seems dogs have learned this bias, too:

And when we look at a face, we have what’s known as a natural left-gaze bias, so you naturally look much more towards the left, i.e. the right-hand side, of somebody’s face.

As far as we know, no other animal has this relationship with the human face. And dogs don’t do this with each other. This suggests that dogs have acquired a new skill enabling them to communicate with us on an emotional level.

Also regarding inter-species communication was the notion that we can understand a dog’s emotion based on their bark.

DOGS BARKING: Bark , bark, ruff, ruff.
ÁDÁM MIKLÓSI: Anger, fear, happiness, despair.

Then there’s the idea that dog domestication may have helped shift us away a from being hunter/gatherers. Seems dogs helped with fundamental changes in human lifestyle:

We are carnivores; we are social carnivores. We hunt in groups, and we hunt in daylight. There are not many other species that do that. The wolf is a social carnivore that hunts by daylight, and, therefore, I think there’s natural potential for teamwork between those two species.

GREGER LARSON: Dogs absolutely turn the tables. Without dogs, humans would still be hunter gatherers, and without that initial starting phase of dog domestication, civilization just would not have been possible.

So put dog domestication alongside of the idea that cooking made us human and you see a picture of serious changes that have radically changed our existence.

I used to think crows were just pests—like pigeons.  Their cawing sound isn’t pleasant, they’re scavengers who eat garbage, etc.

On the other hand, it’s awesome to watch hundreds of them fly around at sunset over Capitol Hill.  And they’re the only group that’s collectively known as a “murder”…which is saying something cool.

Turns out that they’re also incredibly smart! (Feathered apes?)

Check out A Murder of Crows and learn how crows make tools to make other tools (meta-tool use).  Also, hear about research into their ability to remember human faces and inform later generations about dangerous people.

This is an amazing fact:

When breeding season begins, the tiny brains of chickadees and other songbirds enlarge to enable the birds to create more sounds. After the breeding season is over and the birds no longer need that singing function, the part of the birds’ brains that controls vocalizations decreases in size.

Studying the ability of a bird’s brain to generate new neurons in order to sing in the spring fundamentally altered how scientists think about the human brain—and opened the door for new research on understanding degenerative brain conditions, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

More info here: BirdNote.org Black-capped Chickadee