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This Scientific American article discusses how exposure to bright light, like from iPad and computer screens, can cause sleep problems by suppressing your body's release of melatonin.

"Mariana Figueiro of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her team showed that two hours of iPad use at maximum brightness was enough to suppress people's normal nighttime release of melatonin, a key hormone in the body's clock, or circadian system. Melatonin tells your body that it is night, helping to make you sleepy. If you delay that signal, Figueiro says, you could delay sleep. Other research indicates that “if you do that chronically, for many years, it can lead to disruption of the circadian system,” sometimes with serious health consequences, she explains."
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This Scientific American article shares research on how even tiny distractions, like glancing down at a cellphone, can have huge consequences like doubling the rate of making mistakes.

"Though the distractions took only three seconds and weren't difficult tasks, students lost their places or made mistakes twice as often after those distractions as they did without interruptions. The distractions were so brief that they couldn't have caused people to actually forget the tasks they were doing, losing them from short-term memory. Rather, Altmann hypothesizes that the demands of switching attention, no matter how briefly, take mental energy that would otherwise have gone toward the task." read more

This Scientific American article points to a study that reveals how our memories affect our hunger.

Image: iStock/Vitalii Netiaga

"The first result is that there’s no fooling your stomach immediately after a meal. When tested shortly after eating the soup, subjects who had eaten the larger portion were more sated than those who had eaten the smaller portion, and it mattered comparatively little how much people thought they ate. Two cups is more than one cup, and your stomach gets it right, despite any visual trickery. Two and three hours after eating, however, a different sort of pattern emerged. The subjects were all hungrier, of course, but their hunger had little to do with the volume of soup they had actually eaten. Instead, it was what they remembered seeing in the bowl that mattered. In fact, those who ate the small portion and thought it was large were more sated than those who ate the large portion and thought it was small. When it comes to the feeling of fullness, the eyes are more important than the stomach." read more

This is an excellent example of scientific journalism turned narrative - very easy to read, well-researched, and engaging - the journey of a journalist who ends up becoming engaged in his subject, the arcane world of memory competitions. It debunks myths about memory, showing the amazing things that are possible with diligent effort, and encouraging the reader to follow on the journey of improving our memory as a way of improving ourselves. Along the way, Joshua Foer demonstrates that photographic memory is a myth, but that memory is more powerful than we imagine if used with proper techniques such as the ars memorativa that were once at the center of classical education from Roman times to the Middle Ages. Our internal memory has since been supplanted by a world of external memory aids, but can still be improved through discipline.

There is a historical distinction made in regards to our view of memory. For the ancients, memorization was about strengthening character, judgment, citizenship, and piety. Books were not replacements for memory, but memory aids. Reading was done intensively to retain what had been read, not extensively but shallowly like today. We discover that expertise is a direct factor of memory and experience, as Foer debunks the idea that chess masters (or other experts) are more analytical or intelligent than the average person, instead possessing a vast memorial database of long-term experience to draw from. He shows how our memory is strongest in visual and spatial areas, and how memory athletes achieve prodigious feats of memorization by tying their memories to vivid images and locations using mental structures like memory palaces in a practice called elaborative encoding.

We do not remember isolated facts, but things in context, organized through schema that provide meaning. Our internal memories are associational. Often the reason information doesn't stick is that there is nothing to stick it to. As our existing web of information increases, we in turn become better able to embed new information to it. This has given me a serious desire to increase my capability of remembering meaningful things like Scripture, quotations, and deep reading through images, structures, and associational learning. I've already noticed that though it takes more effort to read and remember in the beginning, the information is much more readily retained and accessible. Really, a powerful book that examines the role that memory plays in our lives. read more