Shifty Eyes and Memory

Ha! Check out this article from telegraph.co.uk:

Shifty eyes may be a sign of good memory

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Published: 12:01AM BST 05 May 2007

Moving your eyes from side to side for 30 seconds can boost your power of recall, researchers say.

Horizontal eye wiggles are thought to cause the two hemispheres of the brain to interact more, improving the ability to retrieve memories.

Scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University found people who made horizontal eye movements recognised significantly more previously studied words than subjects who did not make such eye movements. They also had fewer errors in their recall.

Dr Andrew Parker, whose findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Brain and Cognition, said: “That such a straightforward experimental manipulation can bring about enhanced memory for studied information and lower the number of memory errors is quite exciting.”

The work suggests horizontal eye movements could be helping people to remember.

“We are conducting more research to clarify and extend the current findings,” Dr Parker said yesterday.

“It may help someone recall an important piece of information for an exam.”

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Cool, huh! Now, it’s only one study, not exactly about nystagmus and the publication isn’t scientific, BUT wouldn’t that be awesome if it were totally true? It’s like we have super powers 🙂

xoxo

Jo

2 thoughts on “Shifty Eyes and Memory

  1. I’m the mother of a 4 month old who was just diagnosed with nystagmus. I was reading this post and thought about something called EMDR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing. Its a technique sometimes used for post traumatic stress syndrome – basically the horizontal eye movement is thought to engage memory and processing. It would be very interesting to learn more whether the pendular movements of nystagmus trigger any of the same neural processing – possibly improving memory or processing sensory and emotional imput.

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