Scientists believe they have located a new brain area essential for good memory - the "irrelevance filter".
People who are good at remembering things, even with distractions, have more activity in the basal ganglia on brain scans, the Swedish team found.
The work in Nature Neuroscience could help explain why some people are better at remembering things than others.
Clinically, it could also aid the understanding of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The ability to hold information in the mind so that it is immediately accessible is known as working memory.
We use working memory all of the time - for example, when doing a simple maths calculation in our head or recalling a telephone number.
There will be many brain regions that filter irrelevant information, so it is too early to tell if these findings will have a bearing on conditions such as ADHD
clipped from: news.bbc.co.uk 