Blake V Current Event

Pain Produces Memory Gain

Report By: Blake Venden

Written By: Laura Sanders
Published: January 11, 2016

Link: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/pain-produces-memory-gain

There is something very interesting happening.  Doctors at Northwestern University and University Medical Center in Hamburg say that searing pain can cause people to remember things better. They said that if someone was feeling pain when seeing something, then it would be easier to remember what they saw at the time. I had no prior knowledge of such a cool study and investigation. This study involved 31 brave people that the Hamburg doctors recruited who were willing to feel some pain from a, “Heat Delivering Thermode” into their left arm. There was an eight point scale on the amount of heat and pain (2 the least, 8 the most). While in a Functional MRI Scan, the patients were shown some pictures of normal, everyday household objects. After, the people took a quiz on whether the imaged seemed familiar to them.  The people remembered about three-quarters of the objects shown to them, no matter how much heat was given, the researchers found. A year after, the contestants were quizzed again and people had a better time remembering them if feeling level 8 pain versus level 2. Neurologist A. Vania Apkarian of Northwestern University said “The results are fun, the findings speak to the idea that pain really engages memory.”

This article connects to the unt we are studying because in class we have talked about how some cells are long to connect nerves. And I think that when they do this the nerves are sensitive to it, than that remembrance of that moment goes straight to the brain. Some of the scientific knowledge that this gives researchers is a way to help someone remember something. I chose this article because Science News was one of the links that you sent to the class. The title of the article grabbed my attention immediately because it seemed so strange but once I started reading it I was locked in.  This article taught me that there are some cool ways to lock something into the human brain. I agree with the theory the scientists of Hamburg and Northwestern came up with. Because if you think about it would be easier to remember things because you would remember going through the pain, then think about what you saw in that moment. This article was a fun topic to read, it makes it more engaging for the reader. And it made it fun to do a project on.

                  Works Cited

“Pain Produces Memory Gain.” Science News. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2016. <https://www.sciencenews.org/article/pain-produces-memory-gain>.