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Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

most famous case was a Russian journalist known as 'S'. He habitually memorized things using association with places. In antiquity this was taught as 'the method of loci'. The unusual thing was his inability to turn the effect off, and he found it as much a curse as a blessing. He was unable to forget useless information and found it hard to interpret complex images, tending to see areas of color and shade rather than objects such as trees, houses and fields.

Very recently some people have come forward, six in America and one in the UK, who appear to have genuine photographic memories It is well worth watching the TV documentary The Boy Who Can't Forget to gain a sense of what this is like. These people appear to lack the ability to forget, and this turns our understanding of memory on its head. It seems memory might work the opposite way we thought. We had previously thought we only remember what we pay attention to, but perhaps we must actively forget, and this ability is missing in these subjects. Scientists are studying these people to see if they can understand more about memory.

The Aging Brain
We can explode a myth and encourage older readers simultaneously. Memory does not deteriorate with age, or at least not until we are very old. Most studies looking at memory deterioration focus on the very old and compare them with the very young. Even then, the differences are small. When people are asked to attempt memory problems there is a mild drop off with age but the results are quite similar. The most likely reason older people don't remember so well is they don't believe they can. Perhaps they don't have as much incentive to remember new information. Why learn someone's name if you're unlikely to meet them again? Since IQ actually increases with age, don't believe people when they say you are going downhill from the age of 40. You are not!

Computer Brains
Computers are really quite simple compared with all the evolved baggage we humans carry around. When a computer is presented with instructions, for example, for a program like Excel and a file such as my expenses, it will load everything into memory and 'run' it. The process of running a program is simple. Each instruction is a number. The computer reads the number, looks it up in a table, finds a corresponding number, and writes that down. Essentially that's all there is to it. From a simple mechanism like this, we get the enormous complexity of a modern

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