TV REVIEW : Bingham Picks Scientists’ Brains in Mind Study

KCET’s Roger Bingham is a smoothie, in the best sense of the word. When he writes, produces and serves as charming host for an installment of Channel 28’s locally produced series “California Stories,” you can expect excellence and intelligence.

In “Memory: Fabric of the Mind,” tonight’s look at some new findings by local scientists who are trying to discover how the memory works, Bingham upholds his honor pretty well (7:30 p.m. on Channel 28).

The brain, he says, is a magical 3-pound blob of wet tissue packed with billions of tiny information processors, connected in networks and driven by chemistry and electricity.

How it encodes, stores and retrieves data is still largely a mystery, but as Bingham shows, science is on the trail.

Memory researcher Gary Lynch of UC Irvine, for instance, thinks he’s found the basic mechanism of memory foundation. In humans it’s a “magic rhythm” of eye scanning that sets off a train of electrical impulses and biochemical reactions that seem to produce long-term physical changes in brain cell connectors.

One neurobiologist explains his theory that emotional states and hormonal secretions in the brain can affect learning and memory. Another scientist shows proof that memories are stored in specific locations in the brain.

While these and many other clues about how our brains function are not scientifically--or otherwise--earthshaking, they are interesting. “Memory” is actually little more than an around-the-town survey of what memory scientists are up to and how they are collaborating. But Bingham packages all the scientific stuff deftly, even adding such entertaining ribbons as a quiz and a jazz vocalist, Sue Raney, singing a song whose lyrics are nothing but a list of old baseball players’ names.

The story of the search for the mysteries of memory is really still in the making, as Bingham himself acknowledges at the end of a slickly produced and informative--if not particularly memorable--30 minutes.