"Being Neurotic Makes It Harder to Remember Things"

Memory has long been a major area of interest to neuroscientists, and previous work has demonstrated that different personality traits affect working memory. But scientists didn't know just what was happening in the brain to link the two. "Neuroticism is universally implicated in making things difficult for people, whatever they might be doing," says study leader Sophia Frangou at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. "These associations have been known, but there was no mechanism to say why one thing influenced the other." The new work by Dr. Frangou and her colleagues in the United Kingdom and Switzerland explores the relationship between certain personalities and increased or decreased ability of the brain to change the strength of its neural connections based on cognitive demands.

- Sophia Frangou, MD, PhD, Professor, Psychiatry, Chief of the Psychosis Research Program in the Division of Psychiatric Genomics, Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

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