Recommended: Neural Circuitry of Memory
In the process of reading through chapter nine I was intrigued by the memory section, and in particular the episodic memory and its scripts for familiar events. In other words, the way we retain a list of steps in a process and the ability to put them in the order the way they happen. In the text book on page 329 and 330 they give an example of a child at age 3 talking about what happens at a restaurant. At 3 years old the child give only the highlights of the events: enter, sit, eat and leave. But at age 5 the child adds more details by including: ordering, dessert, paying and other details that a younger child would not remember.
The Mindfulness Enhances Episodic Memory Performance article talks about the effects of mindfulness on attention and working memory. The article talks about the three studies which used different methods to examine whether mindfulness would enhance episodic memory. The first study is correlational study, check the benefit and characteristics of mindfulness in episodic memory performance in the Remember- Know (R-K) paradigm. The second study evaluates the usefulness of trait and state mindfulness on episodic memory experimentally. The third study check s whether brief training in focused attention (FA) mindfulness training, relative to both normative and distracted states of mind.
Clive has damage to multiple parts of the brain including his hippocampus, and some of the frontal portion of the brain. The hippocampus is “a structure underneath the cortex that is important in many learning and memory tasks,” (Matlin, Farmer, 1983, p. 160). He continues to have problems creating memories, switching his short-term memories into long-term memories. After being infected, Clive is still able to talk, write, and even show affection to his wife, but a portion of his semantic and episodic memory system were affected.
Each person's memories are unique to each individual. There are specific regions in the brain that hold memories: the hippocampus, the neocortex, and the amygdala. These areas of the brain are responsible for the storage and retrieval of memory. Many psychologists used the terms “hardware” and “software” to describe the brain's memory system. Long-term memory includes memories of personal life events, facts, and information.
In a well-known series of studies, a social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1974 recruited men through local newspapers to participate in what was called a “memory experiment” at Yale University. The participants were told to only arrive at the lab to get the payment, once they were there the money was their’ s to keep. Once the participants were at the lab they were received by a man in a lab coat “the experimenter” who briefed them on the experiment. He informed them that the experiment was to observe the effects of punishment on memory. Participants were then assigned their roles at random by drawing slips of paper from a hat.
Retrograde Amnesia Retrograde amnesia is when you lose all memories from the recent past ( for example you get some sort of brain damage which then leads to the retrograde amnesia and you lose all memories from the past 2-5 years, maybe even less than 2 years and more than 5 ) . You can get retrograde amnesia from brain injuries traumatic events- (posttraumatic amnesia), surgeries, and/or electroconvulsive therapy - ( fact- some people purposely get electroconvulsive therapy to get amnesia, but it is most likely to trigger a seizure). The retrograde amnesia happens because you lost important brain cells, and once you lost them you can't get them back, so you will have to re-make them by making new memories. Chronic Insomnia Chronic insomnia is when you struggle sleeping, insomnia can last a short time (acute insomnia) and can last a long time (chronic insomnia). The cause of the chronic insomnia in this case is from MDD (major depressive disorder).
The Matrix in Your Head Extensive research has shown the important role of the hippocampus in our ability to store memories in a spatial context. This spatial sense is not only related to time, but also to the correspondent physical place where memories were created. The results of the study performed by John O'Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovski in 1971 have further proved this concept of a “cognitive map.” One of the first evidences of the role the hippocampus plays in storing our memories was established in the 1950s, when surgeon William Scoville removed most of the hippocampus of one of his patients in an effort to save the patient's life.
Although procedural skills such as learning to chart plaque scores, applying fixed appliances, removing and restoring decayed dental surfaces are acquired consciously, they become automatic through practice and once they are automatic, thinking about them may not necessarily improve them but instead impair them. Explicit memories are more complex as they are holistic, surrounding aspects such as sights, smells, tastes and emotions; usually a conscious effort is made for the intentional recollection of different aspects of previous experiences and stored information (4). Semantic and episodic memory are aspects of explicit memory where semantic memory refers to our knowledge of the world and episodic memory refers to our capacity to characterise
Introduction Community college may not be as prestigious as a four year university,but they are just as important. Community colleges are also not as expensive as four year universities, but there are some people who believe that it should be completely paid for. Why should this be if community college is already so cheap? Community colleges should not be free because there is already financial aid to help pay for tuition; taxes would rise and since there is a high rate of dropouts it would hurt the economy.
The article I read was Induced forgetting and reduced confidence in our personal past? The consequences of selectively retrieving emotional autobiographical memories. In it, an experiment is performed, and the results of which are discussed are based on the question, does the content of autobiographical memories (a negative or positive association) determine the confidence in them when retrieved? What drove me to choose this article relates to what Professor Stone, whom I only realized when citing the article that he was a co-author of the article, talked to us in class about how retrieving and storing it again can actually change the memory. The example he gave was flashbulb memory and 9/11, as people would always say, “I remember the moment
Abstract The aim of this experiment was to investigate the effect of distraction on the recency effect in memory recalling. The hypothesis was participants in the distraction condition will remember less words at the end of the list (last five words) than those in the control condition. The independent variable is inclusion of distraction math task or not and dependent variable was number of words recalled from the last five words of the list. Independent measure was used in this experiment and thorough convenience sampling 18 participants were recruited.
Another structure in retrieval of information is the frontal lobe (McDaniel et al. 1999). McDaniel, Glisky, Rubin, Guynn, Routhieaux (1999), found that participants with high-functioning frontal lobes compared to low-functioning frontal lobes performed better in prospective memory. This observation came from conducting a study by giving participants a multiple-choice test and eight target questions that appeared throughout the test. High-functioning frontals allows for associating the questions with the right letter and associating the eight spontaneous cues with the right letter but the low-functional frontals capture to much attention just on the multiple-choice questions and cannot register the eight cues. Similarly, focal performance on prospective memory has positive correlations between the hippocampus and parahippocampal in brain volume, while the hippocampus has the strongest correlation (Gordon0020et al. 2011).
The biological approach to the basis of memory is explained in terms of underlying biological factors such as the activity of the nervous system, genetic factors, biochemical and neurochemicals. In general terms memory is our ability to encode, store, retain and recall information and past experiences afterwards in the human brain. In biological terms, memory is the recreation of past experiences by simultaneous activation or firing of neurons. Some of the major biopsychological research questions on memory are what are the biological substrates of memory, where are memories stored in the brain, how are memories assessed during recall and what is the mechanism of forgetting. The two main reasons that gave rise to the interest in biological basis of memory are that researchers became aware of the fact that many memory deficits arise from injuries to the brain.
If you think of the word banana you access your hippocampus in the long term memory which helps you connect links to know what a banana is. For example, yellow, the color of the banana gets stored in the cortex in the visual area. The sound of it gets stored in the auditory area. Thinking about the banana can connect to other memories you have with that subject. The more something goes into your short term memory connecting it to your long term memory the stronger the links are creating a memory that can easily be accessed.
All About Amnesia Amnesia is a disorder of brain that affects the remembering aspect of once memory. It is caused by severe head injury or thru intake of toxic substance that affects the brain. Thought the disease can also impact those who suffer from paralysis or heart stroke. Those who suffer from Amnesia have a tough time remembering previously learnt information such as their name or language. Amnesia victims never remember their past or anything associated with it such as people, place etc.
