Marc Berman

speaker

637 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6 Jul

Marc Berman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

It's got really bad spatial resolution.

So you know something's happening.

You don't know exactly where in the brain it's happening.

I've got colleagues at UChicago, Ed O and Ed Vogel, they use a lot of EEG and they're very interested in using EEG signals to quantify how many things people have in working memory.

And how they, what they do that, one of the ways they do that is actually find that alpha power, which is like seven to 12 Hertz, that actually tells you how many things people have in working memory.

Um, so when alpha power is lower, um, uh, there's not much in working memory as alpha power starts to increase, there's more things in, in working memory.

And actually the direction there might be a little bit off because EG, they sometimes flip the morality.

So negative, sometimes it was positive, but just, just take it to me.

The changes in alpha power track, how many items people have in working memory.

Yeah.

One thing that they have that's really interesting is they do these tasks where you're shown squares on the screen, like four squares, and the squares are colored, and they flash it very quick at like 200 milliseconds, and then they flash the screen again, and maybe one of the squares, the color has changed, and you need to report whether a change has occurred or not.

the task is much easier to do when you're only looking at one square versus looking at three squares, four squares, six squares.

But they've identified that humans really have a working memory capacity of about three items.

You can't really, you can't really, you know, if you show people more than three or four squares, they can't grab anymore.

Their performance falls off.

So here's what's interesting.

So in their task,

Let's say they show you six items versus three items.

In both cases, you can only really remember three items.

So it doesn't matter doing three items out of three or three items out of six, your performance is gonna be the same.

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