September 20, 2023: Forgotten memories may not be gone forever, medical gaslighting is here to stay and a new branch of the human ancestral tree may have been discovered. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Everyday memory lapses–where'd I put the keys? Where did I park?--could be useful for learning, rather than limiting (but always annoying). Some forms of forgetting may be caused by competition between different memories–the brain makes an unconscious call about which information to remember. But the memories that get "forgotten" may still be intact. In studies with mice, researchers found a way to tag and either activate or deactivate specific moments of memory formation. Even when the animals seemed not to recognize a new toy they'd previously seen, for example, the scientists could activate the brain cells associated with the original memory and spark their recognition. The forgotten memories were intact.
Why this matters: Brain disorders with memory loss, like dementia and Alzheimer's, may trigger a very natural process of forgetting, but for the wrong reasons. If so, some of that memory loss may even be reversible because the engrams (the brain changes that happen when a new memory is made) are intact.
What the experts say: This new view of memory disorder in disease "would be a very different way of thinking about pathological memory loss, and it's something that we hope to test in the future," says Tomás Ryan, a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin. | | | Medical gaslighting refers to cases in which a health care practitioner imposes a pattern of questions, testing or diagnosis that runs counter or tangential to the history or symptoms the patient is describing or experiencing, often resulting in misdiagnosis. Modern health practitioners are trained to measure patients against a set of standards, which are overwhelmingly based on data gathered from white males (sex-specific analyses of clinical trials are generally not reported, for example).
Why this matters: The problem disproportionately affects women, people of color and LGBTQ individuals. One prominent example is heart disease, where a woman's symptoms are twice as likely as a man's to be simply written off as mental illness.
What the experts say: More diverse testing and training is required. "Until a much greater part of society is included in that statistical reckoning, we can expect medical gaslighting to remain a part of our medical experiences," writes Caitjan Gainty, a Senior Lecturer in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, King's College London. | | | • Weird math explains why Warren Buffett had the advantage in an unusual dice game against Bill Gates. | 8 min read | | | • Archaeologists discovered two logs that were cut with stone tools almost half a million years ago in central Africa, suggesting that early hominins were expert woodworkers long before Homo sapiens evolved. | 4 min read | | | • U.S. regulators will consider clinical trials of an artificial womb, which could reduce deaths and disability for babies born extremely preterm. | 11 min read | | | A digital reconstruction of the juvenile skull found in Hualongdong, China. Credit: Xiu-Jie Wu and Erik Trinkhaus | | | • Internet access can be a matter of life or death under authoritarian leadership. "To preserve both democratic ideals and basic human rights, Western governments and nongovernmental organizations should incentivize and insist that satellite providers establish simple Internet access for people undergoing communications shutdowns," writes Pouria Nazemi, a freelance Iranian-Canadian science journalist based in Ottawa. | 4 min read | | | • Popular decongestants have been known to be ineffective for years. Why did they stay on the shelves so long? | The Atlantic | | | • A transgenic version of the American chestnut tree that can withstand the blight is on the cusp of being deregulated by the U.S. government. | Grist | | | Medical gaslighting and misdiagnosis have an evil sister that I'm coining medical dismissal. If you are a fan of podcasts, I highly recommend listening to "The Retrievals," by Serial and the New York Times, which documents the shocking dismissal of women's pain at a fertility clinic at Yale University. We'll be covering the way we treat peoples' pain more in the future, so stay tuned. | This newsletter is for you! Let me know how I can improve it by emailing newsletters@sciam.com. Until tomorrow. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | Correction: I'd like to clear up a sentence included in last Friday's newsletter. While discussing the survey of planets around the star TRAPPIST-1, I wrote: "The next star in orbit also lacks an atmosphere and had thick clouds of carbon dioxide." First of all there's a typo here. It should be the next planet in orbit. Thanks to readers who alerted me of that. But several of you also wrote in to ask, if the planet has clouds of carbon dioxide, wouldn't that constitute an atmosphere? I messed up here. It was only speculated beforehand that the planet might host clouds of CO2, but when scientists examined it with JWST instruments, they found that the star-facing side registers at around 107 °C — too hot to maintain a thick atmosphere that is rich in carbon dioxide. | | | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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