A while ago, I searched for a beard trimmer in my bedroom. I spent probably forty-five minutes looking in every likely location at least twice, and every unlikely location at least once. I swore up a storm; the trimmer never turned up. I've played similar games with pants. Our poor memories can seem mystifying, especially when you consider animals.

People with larger brains also have better memory, logic and reactions, scientists have found. The major discovery follows 200 years of research which attempted to find a link between brain size and cognitive performance. MRI scans revealed the link as scientists studied 13,600 people in the largest study of its kind ever undertaken. Researchers from the US and Netherlands compared brain size from MRI scans with cognitive performance and educational achievements. The results of the study, published in the journal Psychological Science, are the most comprehensive example of this type of investigation and is the largest of its kind.

The patient pauses, recognizes the shape, then points to it with her finger. What she's doing is remarkable, not for what she remembers, but for how well she remembers. On average, she and seven other test subjects perform 37 percent better at the memory game with the brain pulses than they do without--making them the first humans on Earth to experience the memory-boosting benefits of a tailored neural prosthesis. If you want to get technical, the brain-booster in question is a "closed-loop hippocampal neural prosthesis." Closed loop because the signals passing between each patient's brain and the computer to which it's attached are zipping back and forth in near-real-time.

Have you ever been warned not to watch a scary movie before going to bed, or risk having nightmares? New research may support this idea, but it may also explain why dreams can be useful for forming long-term memories. When rats are frightened in the day, the fear centers in their brains are re-activated during sleep - potentially helping to strengthen memories. When rats are frightened, the fear centers in their brains are re-activated during sleep - potentially helping to strengthen memories. The study, conducted by researchers at New York University, involved measuring the brain activity of rats as they ran around a maze.

Playing violent'shooter' video games can damage the brain and may even increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease, brain scans suggest. Researchers at the University of Montreal got around 100 people to play a range of popular'shooter' games such as Call Of Duty, Killzone and Borderlands 2 for a total of 90 hours. They also gave them copes of non-violent games from the Super Mario series. By the end of the study, they found that people who habitually played action games had fewer neurons in their hippocampus, a key memory center in the brain. However, those who played non-violent games ended the study with more essential gray matter in their brains.