ipl-logo

The Role Of Memory

2241 Words9 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Memory and brain mechanisms

Memory
Memory is defined as the cognitive system or systems for storing and retrieving information and is a very crucial aspect of our cognition. It is an important part of what makes us truly human and is far more complex than the popular metaphors used to imagine or describe it, such as a filing cabinet or a super computer. In the light of modern psychological and biological knowledge, experts believe that it is one of the most elusive and misunderstood of human attributes. Recognizing the central role of memory, researchers and psychologists have studied it systematically for more than one hundred years. In fact, memory was the focus of some of the earliest research in psychology- studies conducted by Herman Ebbinghaus in 1855 using himself …show more content…

Kandel studied sea snails and other animals with simple nervous systems in an attempt to explain what memories are: synapses or cells? Kandel stimulated the snails’ sensory neurons directly with electrodes. By a process of elimination, neuron by neuron, he mapped out the entire neural circuit of a simple behavior in the snails (the gill-withdrawal reflex) that changes and learns in response to its environment. Then, by removing parts of the circuit to a petri dish and subjecting the neurons to electric shocks and different chemicals, this changed the three neuron circuit in the snail. Function of the neuron changed with increase in the amount of the neurotransmitter produced by the neuron. Structure of the neuron changed with the number of interconnecting dendrites and axon terminals increasing allowing for more communication points (synapses).with this he determined many of the chemical pathways that mediate memory formation. It should be noted that prior to Kandel’s discovery, scientists knew that some kind of chemical change must occur between neurons when we learn. It is fair to ask just how much we can generalize from the slow snails to humans. Research using different species has produced similar results. But, the model is limited to memories that pattern behavior, called implicit or procedural …show more content…

For instance recently it has been suggested that the hippocampus plays main role in the merging of memories, allowing them to be stored in the cerebral cortex of the brain. Richard Thompson sought the engram in the cerebellum, rather than the cerebral cortex. He used classical conditioning of the eyelid response in rabbits in search of the engram. He puffed air upon the cornea of the eye and paired it with a tone. (This puff normally causes an automatic blinking response. After a number of experiences associating it with a tone, the rabbits became conditioned to blink when they heard the tone even without a puff.) The experiment monitored several brain regions, trying to locate the

Show More
Related
1428 Words | 6 Pages

Atkinson, R. C., and Shiffrin, R. M. Some speculations on storage and retrieval processes in long-term memory. Technical Report 127, Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences, Stanford University, 1968. Thorndike, E. L. (1898). Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes in animals.

Read More
1006 Words | 5 Pages

His study proved that the monkey’s brain restructured itself. This test of the brain’s capability to change is what’s known as

Read More
941 Words | 4 Pages

Memory is an important aspect of life as you are able to remember old memories and create new ones as well. In this paper, the focus is primarily on dementia. Declarative memory, procedural memory, and recall are various topics that are used to understand the roles they may play in dementia. Each topic is discussed in a paragraph. In each paragraph I introduce and explain the topic, then provide an example from the movie, The Notebook (Emmerich, Harris, Johnson, Kaplan, & Cassavetes, 2014).

Read More
1495 Words | 6 Pages

The theory of the hippocampus supporting memory function was first discovered more than fifty years ago, in the case study of Henry Gustav Molaiso (H.M.). He endured a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy for the relief of epilepsy. Immediately

Read More
1731 Words | 7 Pages

Bio bases 1. Exam 2. Essay questions. 1. Explain two differences between primary sensory cortex and association cortex

Read More
1057 Words | 5 Pages

And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too—all his life long" (Huxley, Chapter 2), shows how conditioning techniques

Read More
1385 Words | 6 Pages

Then the Skinner box will be discussed, finally leading to the studies of Loftus and Palmer on the link between language and memory. The role and importance of ecological validity in each body of research will be discussed and evaluated. Ecological validity is how much the

Read More
2595 Words | 11 Pages

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.

Read More
663 Words | 3 Pages

After reading an article by Endel Tulving, he talks about memory retrieval with regards to the human brain. He states in his thesis "The purpose of the present article is to question the traditional view that remembering the past and knowing things learned in the past represent similar cognitive processes" (Tulving, 1989). He continues by saying "I would suggest that remembering and knowing, as these terms are used here, are more appropriately conceptualized as operations of two hypothetical memory systems, episodic and semantic memory, and that in that sense they are not only similar, as all memory systems must be, but also basically different" (Tulving, 1989). In Tulving's first piece of evidence to support the above thesis he uses an example of a case study.

Read More
721 Words | 3 Pages

There are other similar yet distinct circuits for other things like sugar or even remembering the taste of water which is innate; it’s built in their antennae. This explains the “wanting” when the fly enters the wet tube after being thirsty. The “liking” is observed with the pickpocket 28 neurons telling the proboscis to react to the presence of sugar water. And the “learning” is when the fly remembers its choices when it was thirsty to get to the wet tube as it remembers the taste of water. The researchers are getting a finite glimpse into our own reward systems through flies; even at 2 neurons within the flies.

Read More
936 Words | 4 Pages

“Adaptive Memory Remembering With a Stone-Age Brain” Summary: This article describes the facts about adaptive memory, relation of memory development with evolution and reasons behind the evolution of the memory. Basically adaptive memory is the investigation of memory systems that have evolved to help hold survival-and fitness-related information, i.e., that are designed for helping an organism improve its conceptive fitness and odds of surviving. One key component of adaptive memory look into is the idea that memory evolved to help survival by better holding information that is fitness-relevant. One of the establishments of this technique for contemplating memory is the moderately minimal adaptive value of a memory system that evolved just

Read More
448 Words | 2 Pages

Social instability was a great struggle within Europe. The lack of social strength within the public led the Hundred Years War, by bringing forth the tragic past of the great famine, revolts, violence, and unrest between various individuals that caused a sense of disunity and lack of control. In time, this social turmoil migrated to the monarchs, Philip VI of Gascony and King Edward III and caused disagreements on ideas and personality confrontation, which triggered distress. This social upheaval from past tragedies instigated the need for plunder and territorial gain and the need to follow the rulers. However, the main causes of the outbreak evolved from territorial, successional, and social disputes.

Read More
1358 Words | 6 Pages

This is what other researchers have thought of too, and therefore a conclusion was made that additional processes have been taking place as well. Another strength is that there is neuropsychological evidence for this model as a patient, HM (Milner, 1966) underwent surgery which impaired his hippocampus and in turn affected his long-term memory as it no longer functioned properly, whereas his short-term memory was rather functional. Due to this we can conclude that these two processes are involved in the process of memory, as one of the stores was affected when the brain was damaged but the other was not (Baddeley, 2009).

Read More
921 Words | 4 Pages

79). Watson believed that the differences in experiences of learning lead to different behaviours: "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and the race of his ancestors” (Watson, 1924, p. 104). Based on this belief Watson and Raynor (1920) designed the Little Albert Experiment to explore how classical conditioning can be used to condition an emotional response. “Classical conditioning occurs when two stimuli become associated with one another such that one stimulus now triggers a response that previously was triggered by the other stimulus,” (Passer & Smith, 2011, p. 214).

Read More
1648 Words | 7 Pages

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.

Read More

More about The Role Of Memory

Related Topics

Open Document