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The Seven Sins Of Memory Research

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While the human brain allows humans to sustain life and perform many complex tasks, like anything it has its flaws. One function of the brain that repeatedly fails us is memory. Before attempting to understand the flaws located throughout the memory process, the basic types and systems of memory need to be understood. The two basic types of memory are short and long term. The first type of memory, short term, requires conscious thought to acquire and can only hold a limited amount of information that can only be kept for a duration of less than a minute (Smith, 2016). On the other hand, long term memory does not require conscious thought to acquire and can hold large amounts of information for extended periods of time (Smith, 2016). These types …show more content…

Following encoding is the second memory system, storage, which is the action of maintaining memories in your brain (Gilbert, et al., 2015). The final memory system is retrieval, which is the action of bringing memories into the present (Smith, 2016). With a basic understanding of the different types of memory and how they are stored, we can now explore some ways these systems fail us, which are commonly known as the “Seven Sins of Memory.” The first sin of memory that Daniel Schacter discusses is transience. Transience happens to everybody and is the process of forgetting things as time passes (Gilbert, et al., 2015). For example, throughout tests conducted on native English speaking participants that had taken Spanish courses in school, many of the participants began to forget the content they had learned very rapidly over the first three years following the course and then continued to forget the content at a slower rate in the time following (Gilbert, et al., 2015). While the retrieval …show more content…

A great example of this is bias, which is the process of past experiences, knowledge, or emotion influencing the way you remember something (Schacter 1999). The cause of bias could be considered short term memory, because current emotions could influence your memory, or long term memory because ultimately the memory altered has been held onto for an extended period of time. An example of bias could be somebody currently in a healthy relationship remembering a previous relationship as a bad experience because of their current feelings in their new relationship (Murray, 2003). While bias consists of changing your memories due to emotion, persistence is quite the contrary. Persistence is repeatedly remembering events that we wish we could forget (Smith, 2016). Since persistence involves recalling memories to current times, it is a part of long term memory and retrieval. An example of retrieval would be an athlete not being able to forget letting his team down in a very important competition (Murray,

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The third part of this was a another scan while they were asked from memory to remember the pairs. They were not able to remember many of the pairs. The results showed that the test subjects were able to consciously repress the memory of the second word of the pairs. Proving that the brain is able to repress memories. Based on my research and my own opinions, I was able to ascertain from many accounts that a suppressed memory is most likely to resurface when an incident happens that slightly resembles what occurred of felt in the repressed memory.

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Introduction “Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?” (Alfred de Vigny). Memory encodes various pieces of information that can be utilized in an enormous amount of situations to benefit people. However, memory is also fallible. It alters and creates new memories, changing the original encoded data for unknown reasons.

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The human brain is the most extraordinary thing in the universe but sometimes we create false memories without knowing. The human brain consists of a hundred billion neurons, as many as the entire Milky Way galaxy (“Voytek”). It stores numerous memories from childhood to the present. The majority of us, however,

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An example of this when Guy realizes that him and Mildred couldn’t remember where they first met “ And suddenly she was so strange he couldn't believe he knew her st all.” ( Chapter 1 Page 42) By suppressing these memories, people aren’t able to form close relationships with anyone else. In 1984, Winston lets go of his childhood memories, dismissing them as “ false memories” . Him dismissing these memories shows the amount of control that

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Introduction to Human Psychology – PSYC 1111 Written Assignment Unit 4 University of the People Article review on Repressed Memories As stated in OpenStax College (2014) textbook, repressed memories are memories that are so viciously encoded, in the childhood age mostly, that the brain squeezes them into a corner where it will be very difficult for someone to recall them. When in adulthood some or all of the memories can return triggered by an irrelevant stimuli, but they might as well never come to surface at all. According to Loftus (1993), during the 80’s and the 90’s many cases of repressed memories that came to surface, were reported. These reports ended in court with convictions of guilty but of innocent people as well.

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There are two types of long term memory declarative and procedural. Longterm declarative memory is stored in the hippocampus of the brain, any damage to this part of the brain would cause one the inability to form new memories. Procedure memories are stored in the cerebellum (Parts of Brain 2015) . Working memory and the ability to retrieve information is in the prefrontal cortex. Also in the prefrontal lobe, different parts than the working memory, is the semantic and episodic memory.

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People believe that memory can retrieve the information and they can give the response to the information. We have two parts of memory which are the long-term memory and short-term memory. Long-term memory can keep information in a long time and the capacity for this memory is unlimited. its storage stretches from a few moments ago to as far back as one can remember.

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People cannot correctly identify a penny after years of using them because it is such a small detail to know the four parts of the penny and where they are and what they say. However, repressed memories are typically important things that the mind subconsciously wants to forget for any reason. They can be accurate however because psychotherapists have even been shocked by the true detail of some of the stories they hear. Some are so gruesome and real that it would be hard to fabricate the whole story.

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When one allows themselves to see past the merkiness of unreliability in a memory and look solely at what that memory means, the validity of the memory is left. Furthermore, a memory does not have to be a word by word, detail by detail, account of an event to hold a degree of validity for

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We all would like to forget something but is not as simple as that shapes your existence. In “The Attic of the Brain” by Lewis Thomas talks about how humans want to control every aspect of the brain. He states “There is no delusion more damaging than to get the idea in your head that you understand the functioning of your own brain.” Essentially is only a delusion humans have and can never hope to achieve and only will hurt us, while this may be true or not who’s to say. He also talks about how we may want to “to take charge, guiding your thoughts”, like to repress some our memories like in a “trapdoor”.

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He says that while he believes memories can be repressed and recalled, there is a risk of false

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How reliable are the two models or theories of the cognitive process of memory, “|…|the process of maintaining information over time” (Matlin, 2005) , known as the multistore model (MSM) and the levels of processing model (LOP)? Both of these models have been widely criticized, but simultaneously they have improved our knowledge and understanding of how the process of memory works. In this essay both of these models of memory will be evaluated by presenting the strengths and limitations of each. The first model, the multistore model, was put forward by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) which suggests that the concept of memory involves three stores; the sensory stores, the short-term store (STS), and the long-term store (LTS).

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Both the first as well as the second world wars are landmark events in modern world history. In the case of the First World War, the principal actors were the European powers of Britain, Germany, Austria, etc with minor participation from the United States. The Second World War saw a more meaningful participation from the United States of America, which was then set to become the leading superpower in the post war years. While the state of military warfare was rudimentary and simple during the years of the First World War, the Second World War saw significant advancements in military technology. The advent of Tanks by the Third Reich is perceived by experts to be a crucial factor in the dynamics of combat during the Second World War.

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If information stored in the short-term memory is not learned and given attention, it will decay over time (Schunk 2012, p. 183). The short-term memory has a small capacity, and large amounts of information cannot all be stored (Schunk 2012, p. 183). To make it esier, information can be shortened or broken up to fit it in the short-term memory (Schunk 2012, p. 183). Information that is used will be transferred into the long-term store/ long-term memory (Schunk 2012, p. 183). There are different strategies to strengthen the memory of information from short-term to long-term.

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Introduction According to information processing model, short term memory has a limited capacity to hold information (Atkinson & Shriffin, 1968). The span of short term memory is said to be limited to about seven items (+2) (Miller, 1956 as cited in Terry, 2000). Short-term memory is also an active memory where we do our active memory processing (Lefrancois, 2000). For this reason, several researches have called the short term memory the working memory store (Gordon, 1989).

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