| Summary: | ALEXANDRA NICOLE TRELLE, Ph.D., a memory researcher at Stanford University, is in the middle of explaining why dozens of research centers around the country are feverishly trying to understand the most effective ways to prevent big memory problems. Over the past decade, hundreds of study subjects have submitted to hours of memory testing while lying inside the high-res MRI machine tucked away in an adjacent room, allowing scientists to peer into their brains and watch what happens as they form, and then try to retrieve, memories. "We set up the MRI to optimize our ability to measure what's happening in the hippocampus, an area of the brain that's critical for memory", says Trelle, the study's lead postdoc. By watching memory lapses in action and comparing people's performance over time, Trelle and her colleagues hope they can identify the early signs of memory decline and uncover its causes, as well as clues about how to prevent it.
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