Recently in MEM Category

Thirty people worked for 1,357 hours over 22 months to create the stop-motion animation music video for singer Kina Grannis's sweet song, "In your arms." What did they do? They could have used CGI, of course, but they didn't. They created images with 288,000 jelly beans, one image after another, then carefully photographed each image--2,460 frames in all--with a still camera. Iconic memory does the rest.

Is it cranky for me to point out that 30 people working full-time over 22 months would be 110,000 hours (it is standard to assume that a full-time position is 2,000 hours per year.) Was the team that created this video dedicated but under-employed artists? So it must be a labor of love.

If you are curious about how it was actually done (a very interesting video, actually):

Recent brain research (HERE and HERE) has found a fold in the brain (in the paracingulate sulcus) that affects how well we can discriminate between real events and imagined events.

Participants were asked either to imagine the second name in a well-known duo (Laurel and ?) or to read the name pair read out loud (or listened as the experimenter read it) : "Laurel and Hardy." Then they were asked to recall whether they had imagined it or heard it. People with the PCS fold were significantly better at remembering.

"The researchers discovered that adults whose MRI scans indicated an absence of the PCS were significantly less accurate on memory tasks than people with a prominent PCS on at least one side of the brain. Interestingly, all participants believed that they had a good memory despite one group's memories being clearly less reliable."

It make me very curious about people who are very suggestible, such as Paul Ingram, and people who show the misinformation effect. The fold is one of the last parts of the brain to develop and is present in about 50% of the population. The 16% of participants in Elizabeth Loftus's research who remember seeing Bugs Bunny at Disney world...are they among the PS fold-free population?