Analysis Of The Podcast 'Memory And Forgetting'

Self as it Relates to Memory and Forgetting Introduction and Thesis: The podcast “Memory and Forgetting” has shown that developments in memory and the brain further contradicts a Lockean view of duality and self, in favor of a materialistic view. In “Memory and Forgetting” guest neuroscientists Karim Nader and Joe LeDoux, science writer Jonah Lehrer, and cognitive psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Loftus explain some of the developments about memory. During the 1960’s neuroscientists learned that there the proteins in our brain help the neurons to form new connections and these connections are our memories. Lehrer explains that once this connection is made we can remember that memory, but we are actually recreating the memories and therefore replacing them with new memories that are “reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now” (“Memory and Forgetting”). LeDoux and Nader experimented anisomycin, a drug that prevents proteins from forming

Their experiments showed that not only can the drug stop new memories from being formed, but we can also use it to target and remove an existing memory by taking the drug when someone is remembering, or recreating, that memory. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus work also shows how malleable our memory is. She has found that by placing misinformation along with an actual event, it was not difficult to alter the memories of the previous event. She eventually found that she could implant entirely new memories of a person’s childhood that had never actually taken place. She would ask individuals about true experiences that they had and about a false experience that she made up. Individuals would then take parts of other memories and recreate the experience that Loftus described. A quarter of the people she interviewed now have memories of something that has never happened. When you are recreating or remembering an experience