The "reminiscence bump" causes memories from adolescence to last

Nostalgia is a psychological coping mechanism created from bias

Memories are naturally reconstructed during recall, and research has shown a fading effect bias that causes negative ones to fade more quickly, helping us heal. This creates a natural longing for the past, particularly when faced with loneliness, boredom, or challenging moments in the present.

Can music alter your memories?

You’re familiar with music’s ability to transport you to a past experience, but new research suggests that music can even alter how you remember your past experiences. A team of psychology researchers and music experts recently published a study that demonstrates how music can help shift our emotional recollection of a memory. Read to learn more about the study’s findings and how it could influence therapy practices.

False memories can form during recall when new information is incorporated

Often formed due to suggestion and misinformation, false memories can lead to serious consequences, such as wrongful convictions. The time between an event and recalling it affects one's susceptibility to false memories.

Retrieval cues trigger memories and emotions from long-term storage

Retrieval cues can activate specific cells in a neural network, creating a cascade of neurons that collectively make up a memory. Specific cues help regulate emotions during stress by activating positive memories.

Age, stress, and neurological disorders can prevent memory formation and recall

Neurons transmit signals between one another at sites called synapses. Repeated interactions at these sites improve the efficiency of signal transmissions, making memories involving sensory data associated with those neurons easier to recall. Biochemical factors impacting these synaptic interactions affect memory quality.

The emotional regression that happens when we visit home

Despite how mature we might like to think we are, returning home for the holidays often results in reverting to our moodier, angstier childhood selves. This story in the conversation dives into the root of this phenomenon, which can largely be explained by attachment theory. Read along to understand how your past experiences and attachment style can influence your current behaviors and for advice on how to cope with regression.

The brains of people who experience frisson have unique neural pathways

A small 2016 study aimed to investigate the behavioral and neural differences between 10 individuals who experience goose bumps when listening to music and 10 who typically don’t. Scientists reported that individuals experiencing musical chills had greater white matter connectivity in specific auditory, emotional, and social processing areas of the brain.

Déjà vu is a memory illusion involving brain regions correcting inaccurate memories

Neuroscientists suggest the phenomenon is your brain recognizing that this feeling of familiarity is incorrect, showing off the brain's internal fact-checking system. Younger people experience déjà vu more often because their brains have higher excitatory activity and stronger memory monitoring systems.

Scent is a stronger memory trigger than sight

Smell is imbued with more emotion than visual memories, and research indicates that smell triggers a significantly greater effect on amygdala activation. Scientists believe these powerful responses occur partly because smell signals bypass the thalamus and go directly to the amygdala and hippocampus, brain areas involved in emotion and memory.

Sharp wave ripples in the brain tag experiences for long-term memory storage

These ripples were known to quickly replay neuronal sequences during sleep for consolidation. While awake, they help the brain prioritize memories to remember, and their disruption can impair memory formation.

What happened to thousands of teens from the 1990s?

Scientists followed thousands of teenagers from 1997 into their 30s, cataloging their adverse experiences along the way via nearly three decades of interviews. Teens who grew up dealing with poverty, uninvolved parents, and other childhood stressors and traumas racked up an ACE score. These adverse childhood experiences have lifelong impacts on one's health, relationships, financial security, and "pretty much everything else," making them more likely to suffer premature death.

Childhood memes like '67' existed before the internet

Kids saying "67" and then erupting in laughter may have been popularized by social media, but childhood rhymes, songs, and jokes that confuse adults have always existed. Iona and Peter Opie studied the phenomena, publishing numerous books on the topic from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Core memories are a popularized version of autobiographical memories

Core memories are not limited to five key events, do not individually shape personality traits, and are not formed in childhood. Our strongest memories are formed in early adulthood, but are as prone to error as any other memory.

Fame can trigger addictive, drug-like highs in the brain

Differences in the type of fame, such as movie stardom, sports, and internet virality, can produce varying degrees of dependence on individuals based on their age and background. Some individuals—particularly children—can develop drug-seeking behavior as they pursue continuous dopamine spikes if they lack an existing sense of fulfillment from elsewhere.

To get that song out of your head, try distracting yourself or playing a new song

Around 90% of people experience getting a snippet of a song stuck in their head, also known as an earworm. Researchers think they are linked to memory, repetition, and inner rehearsal. Before written language, music was used alongside rhyming in many cultures to help people preserve oral histories.

Your brain appears to age in five distinct stages

Analysis of brain scans from about 4,000 people has helped scientists identify five major stages of our brain's maturation from birth to death. The pattern of connections inside our brains seem to shift, on average, at ages 9, 32, 66 and 83. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

How does muscle memory work?

Muscle memory is less about remembering how to ride a bike and more about what's happening in muscle cells. Increasing the cells' size, say by working out, leads to an increase in nuclei, which increases the production of mitochondria. When your fitness regimen falls to the wayside and you decide to re-enter the gym, these gains-based nuclei are already present to quicken muscle cells' adaptation to exercise.

Measles infection can cause long-term immune system “amnesia”

The measles virus attacks the body's immune system, including preying on T and B cells in the lymphatic system. These cells hold memories of past infections, which can be degraded as the virus destroys them. This leaves patients susceptible to other infections for a year or longer.

Read a study documenting how 'old people' smell increases with age

Analysis of body odors from individuals aged 26 to 75 confirmed that 2-nonenal, an unsaturated aldehyde with an unpleasant, greasy, and grassy odor, was detected only in subjects aged 40 and older.

Researchers believe the brain consolidates memories, processes emotions, and plans for the future during dream states

The 1980s neo-pop movement put pop art back in the zeitgeist

Pop art’s legacy is perhaps best exemplified in its longevity. Long after the end of pop art’s classical phase, a neo-pop revival ushered in a new cohort of artists like Murakami, Hirst, and Koons who brought pop once again to the top. To this day, contemporary pop artists—young and seasoned—command high prices on the open market.

Age-related hearing loss, known as presbycusis, is a top cause of hearing loss

This video walks through the biology of why presbycusis (prez-buh-kyoo-sis) occurs and its etiology. This type of hearing loss is gradual and typically starts with reductions in the ability to hear high-pitched sounds.

Roughly one in every 250 has never remembered a single dream

Most people dream for about two hours every night and recall about two dreams per week, and memory encoding is especially fragile upon waking. Alarms can knock dreams right out of one's head, and dream recall may be influenced by personality, interest, and socialization.

Girls are hitting puberty earlier than ever before

Around the world, there has been a spike in children—especially girls—experiencing early puberty and doctors are seeking to understand why. The rise has been particularly strong post-2020. Early-maturing girls are at a higher risk for developing...

The most popular drum sound of the 1980s was discovered by accident

You know it when you hear it: the distinct snare drum of songs like Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" or Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA." It's called "gated reverb," and it's something most people associate, for better or worse, with the sound of the '80s. This Vox explainer breaks down how it was discovered by accident, thanks to a microphone typically used for communication that picked up additional sounds.

Babies taste food in the womb via amniotic fluid, and it may influence future taste buds

Some estimates suggest that around Week 16 during pregnancy, a growing fetus can begin to taste amniotic fluid that contains flavors in the food that their mother consumed, due to taste bud formation. Scientists think those early flavor experiences may influence future taste preferences. Other scientific resources put that time much later, however—around Week 30.

Recent research found that the brain doesn't seem to massively rewire following amputation—upending earlier beliefs about the cause of phantom limb pain.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

About 12.5% of US adults experience a phobia in their lifetime, a diagnosis that hinges on the intense fear interfering with daily life and persisting for at least six months.

US housing costs have risen by roughly 175% between 1991 and 2026—but a growing number of Gen Zers are becoming homeowners anyway. In 2025, 4% of homebuyers were Gen Z, up from 3% the year before.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

When a Paris department store hesitated to sell Estée Lauder's perfume, she 'accidentally' broke a bottle, causing the smell to spread throughout the store and shoppers to start asking to buy the scent.

Poison ivy can cause rashes year-round since all parts of the plant contain urushiol, the oil that triggers our allergic response.

Bone marrow (soft tissue found inside certain bones) generates roughly 500 billion new blood cells each day

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

A pickleball's loud 'pop' sound can reach 120 decibels, which is equivalent to a hammer hitting a nail

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

The 1987 Nintendo video game 'Stadium Events' isn't known for being particularly fun, but its scarcity has made it a highly sought-after item that has sold for up to $35K at auction.

The Ramones' 'Pet Sematary,' the theme song for the Stephen King novel of the same name, was written while the band was admiring the writer's collection of horror memorabilia.

Massive blooms of microscopic plankton called dinoflagellates produce the neon blue light seen in glowing tides.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

In preparation for this weekend's Eurovision finale, which is something like the World Cup of pop music, here's a young Céline Dion performing (for Switzerland?) at the 1988 competition.

Scientists can determine Earth's past climate conditions by analyzing air trapped in microscopic bubbles within ice cores—columns of compressed snow layers that build up over hundreds of thousands of years.

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.