This is a pretty interesting article I read in NewScientist website, altho' this is a 28th of May 2005 article, it's still quite recent, heh. The study was done on fruit flies but the results might be the same for humans too. Here's the article:
"If you are forever forgetting people's names or family birthdays, take heart. Forming permanent memories is so physiologically expensive it can result in early death - at least for fruit flies.
When fruit flies form lasting memories, their neurons must make new proteins. Now Frederic Mery and Tadeusz Kawecki at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland have shown that this extra work takes its toll on the flies' ability to survive.
They trained one group of flies to associate a jolt with a bad-smelling mixture of two alcohols, while other flies were subjected either to jolts only or to jolts and odours, but not at the same time. When the flies were subsequently deprived of food and water, the group that had learned the link died an average of 4 hours, or 20 per cent, earlier than the others (Science, vol 308, p 1148).
The study suggests that there is a cost to memory and learning, raising the question of whether humans lost other qualities when they evolved superior intelligence. "We have such an extraordinary memory and learning capacity, we must have paid for it," says Kawecki"
Hmm, yes we must have paid for it. Who knows, people who have short-term memory might have a longer life than people who have long-term memory. Although, I think people who have long-term memory should have more advantage since they are able to remember more things. But ya, they'll need to make more cells to remember more things and etch them inside too. Well, We'll just leave it to more studies then.
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