Electromagnets are being used to help people remember things thought forgotten from short-term memory

For decades, it has been thought that short-term memory (otherwise known as working memory) was a result of a constant stream of attentive neurons, holding onto an idea.  It was thought that, if one were to stop using this neural pathway, the memory was gone forever.  Now, a new study out of the University of Notre Dame in Australia shows that we may actually be able to reform ideas out of an unknown method, even if we have completely let them slip from our minds.

"This changes how we think about the structure of working memory and the processes that support it," one of the team, Nathan Rose, said.

"The notion that you’re aware of everything all the time is a sort of illusion your consciousness creates. That is true for thinking, too," said one of the researchers, Brad Postle from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a press release.

"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."

By pulling together a group of 66 participants, they were able to show them a face and a word, asking them 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," Jon Hamilton reports for NPR.

"But then ... 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 said.

At this point, they would begin asking participants to remember the face, while stimulating the area of the brain that is responsible for remembering the name with electromagnets.  This would cause the people to remember the name, even though it had not been "stored" in their short-term memory.

"People have always thought neurons would have to keep firing to hold something in memory. Most models of the brain assume that," Postle explains in the release.

"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."

This is bringing researchers to look for cures to mental illness like schizophrenia and depression, much of which is associated with disruptions in thought.

"A lot of mental illness is associated with the inability to choose what to think about," says Postle. "What we’re taking are first steps toward looking at the mechanisms that give us control over what we think about."