Extending Reading: "It's Magical it's malleable, it's memory."

• Our memory is what makes us who we are today. In other words, selfhood is nothing but what we have experienced and encoded into our memory system. Whether it is the information about ourselves, others, or general knowledge that makes each one of us distinct from another. Our selfhood, in short, is created and can be affected by our memories. The article stated that memory is the bedrock of selfhood, meaning that it is the solid base of who we are and that our sense of self is quite strong. Yet, the idea is challenged with the fact that maybe our memory is not as solid as we thought it would be, and that changing just a part of it could affect the whole selfhood.

• The discovery that I found to be most interesting to me was that the fight-or-flight response is related to permanent memories. The fight-or-flight response is the arousal of body when encountered with threatening stimuli or environment; this involves increasing heart rate, blood pressure, muscle contraction, increase respiratory rate, etc. This makes me wonder how a memory could become indelible when we experience it with the fight-or-flight response. I want to know how the two systems, the memory and nervous, are connected and what really happens when we encode our memories when we are stimulated.

• The homunculus crisis, according to the article, is the mystery of what is controlling our memories, what brings old memories back when we are doing something since our neurons system in the brain is too far complex for us to understand.

• Lynch’s experiment is supported by the biological view of dreams interpretation since they also believe that dreaming enhances learning and memory. Moreover, Lynch’s experiment also shows that human’s memory is at work during REM sleep, and that learning occurs at that stage. Lynch has the same principle as the biological psychologist who studies processes of humans’ body and believes that our behaviors are affected by the chemical reactions in our bodies.

• Indelible memories often occur when we have encountered a fight-or-flight response, and that our body optimizes our memory storage by the use of hormones that are released. Moreover, indelible memories are important to us since it gives us vivid recollection of situations that might be threatening or danger, so that we would be prepared for it. Yet, some indelible memories are triggered by a part of our limbic system that is called Amygdala, which is links with our emotions. In other words, memories can become permanent, or even trigger post traumatic stress disorder- a psychological disorder where a patient is haunted by flashbacks of his or her memory- when it involves strong emotions such as fear, panic, stress, or excitement.

• There are two kinds of memory loss: amnesia and repression. Amnesia occurs when a person loses his or her consciousness due to a blow to the head, which often happens in accidents, and fail to remember what happened, or when his/her hippocampus is damaged. Repression, which is a defense mechanism that out cognitive system develop to deal with stressful situation, is when a person repress, or putting into subconscious, a repeating traumatic memories that has happened to him or her. The memory loss due to repression can be triggered and retrieved again after a period of time has passed.

• This statement can be explained using the knowledge we have about confabulation and decay. Confabulation is when we “fill in the gaps” when retelling a story. In other words, we might include something that is not in the original story into our retelling, making the story distorted. Another reason that memories are often reconstructive the reproductive can be explained using what we know about decay. Long term memories, when not being retrieved for a period of time, start to decay, and the story seems to me more vague and brief through time. This is why we are not able to recall exactly what is encoded into our memories, but just the important facts and events which had our attentions.

• The new paradigm of memory state that we are who we are by the memories of ourselves and being able to tell the stories about our own lives. Yet, our memories are not always precise; they contain both what is real, and what is fallacious. Moreover, our memories are the mixtures of what we saw and how we felt; it is both objective and subjective. Objective by the fact that the perceived images are true, and subjective that we added our emotions into the process of encoding.

• It is right to say that memories have strong effects on who we are, or our selfhood. However, memories do not always hold true according to the fact that our memories decay, got repressed, lost, and confabulated. We all seems to know ourselves and who we are well, yet scientist are not able to figure out what triggers our memories and what controls our emotion despite their biological approaches. Our memories define who we are, but no matter how familiar you are with your memories, there are still questions of how it functions and how the networks are connected.

Class Demonstration: Memory is often a reconstruction

Mr. Anthony asked us to remember several visual stimuli that were present for a few seconds each. Later, He handed out a piece of paper filled with words to each of us, and asked us to draw all the stimuli that we remembered onto the paper.

And here’s the catch, the paper that we receive contains different words, and that the purpose of this experiment was to show that we reconstruct the images we saw from the “cues” that were given.

The result was that people who received different cues reconstruct the images different from the real image. In other words, they then to draw pictures that are similar to the images of the cues more then what they remember. Though the result of the class did not appear to be quite the same with the actual results, some of the recollections made by the class are slightly different from the stimuli presented.

The rumor chain activity

Mr. Anthony asked fro 4 volunteers to recite a story he has read to each other. He asked three of the volunteers first to leave the class and told a story about a hijacker to the first volunteer, then he called the others volunteer in one by one and let them recite the story to each other from what they heard from the previous volunteer.

The Result was as follow:

The flight information was lost
The Hijacker was called terrorist
The revolutionary army was lost
The cockpit was called the pilot cabin
The name of the pilot was lost and the number of pilot was two at the end
The name of the gun was changed from .357 Magnum to magma gun
The information about the radio was lost
The action of the angry passengers was lost

From the demonstration he concludes that the story got more and more condensed as it went from a volunteer to another. Some information got leveled, or cut off. Some was sharpened, or emphasized, and some information was added through assimilation, or changes in detail to fit the subject to the background of knowledge, which in this case was the number of pilots. This explains the concept of gossiping, that the news get more vague and dangerous as it spread.

Class demonstration 3: Meaning enhances recall

In this demonstration, Mr. Anthony prepared a set of twenty words on sheets of paper which have either the letter A or B on it. Then he asked us to memorize the words that he will show to us for a few seconds. However, he also asked us to do the following: if the sheet of paper has a letter A on it, count the syllables, and state whether the words have pleasant or unpleasant meaning if the word B was written on the sheet of paper. The hypothesis of this demonstration was that people would remember the words with the letter B on it better than ones with A.

The result was the following:

· We have a bimodal distribution with the modes at 15 and 10
· The range of the data was 10, spreading from 10-20
· 3 people remembered more A words than B
· 4 people had the equal amount of A and B memorized
· 9 people remembered more B words than A
· The average of the class was at 15-16 words

This shows that by giving meaning to the words, it is easier for us to encode them to long term memory compared to the words that we did not give meaning to. Moreover, I have used mnemonic device to help me memorize all the words, which is highly effective in this demonstration since I was able to recall all 20 of the words. So it can be concluded that in addition to giving meaning to the words, making stories and associating the words with other mnemonic devices also improve our memory on vocabulary.

Phillip Zimbardo: Discovering Psychology

This episode of Discovering Psychology introduced us to one of the most significant ability of our brains, our ability to retain the incoming stimuli and process them, our memory. Our brain is able to hold as much as one hundred trillion bits of information, yet a number of them decay through time. Our memory is divided into three parts, sensory memory, short term memory, and long term memory. Our long term memory is like the storage of all information we know about ourselves and the world. Prior to being stored in the long term memory, every sensory input is processed through our short term memory, which has the capacity of 5-9 objects, and fades as soon as we shift our attention to other things. Scientists have long been trying to discover where our memory lies and how the process work. The video introduced us to Ebbinghaus, a psychologist that did an experiment on how our memory works by memorizing unrecognizable patterns of letters and study the effect of learning. Besides Ebbinghaus, scientists experimented on rats to see if removing any parts of the brain tissues has any effect on memory. The result was that regardless of the location where the tissues are removed, the rat exhibit memory loss in getting along the constructed course. Moreover, studies on memory have led to the detection of deterioration of our brain tissues due to Alzheimer’s disease from the experiment on rabbits to see the location of the brain that they encode information about learning. By applying this test to human in form of the tone-wind-blinking classical conditioning to the patient, we are able to discover early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in human.

Class Demonstration : M E M O R I E S

Demonstration 1: Immediate memory Span

In this demonstration, we are asked to remember a series of numbers ranging from 3 to 12 numbers, and recite them when a series is read. After checking the results, which I ended up making a mistake at 9-digit number, Mr. Anthony explained that our sensory memory span can take in about 7 things at a time, and that regular people can remember things in the range of 7-9 stimuli. Yet he told that there are several students who were able to complete the series until 12-digit number. Moreover, he explained the use of chunking, a strategy that would help us remember series of numbers or words by putting them together in little pieces of 3 or 4, and recall them as sets of number. This example of chunking can be seen in our daily life through telephone numbers, social security numbers, and words that are written.

Demonstration 2: Short Term Memory

Again Mr. Anthony asked us to remember, but this time in series of words. He read out about 20 words to the class, which some of them repeated. Then he asked us to write everything we can recall. As a result, the mean score of the words that the class remembered was 7. However, there were some astounding findings in the results of the demonstration. It is that some of us remembered the words that were not there. Mr. Anthony later explained that we constructed the words that are not there by ourselves from making associations with other words, this kind of memory is called the constructive memory. In addition, Mr. Anthony went into the impact of the serial position effect, or the primary-recency effect, that most of us remembered the words that came first and last and not the ones in the middles. Moreover, there are words in the list that could be chunked together to remember such as toss and turn, and that there was a word that was different from others and we remembered it by its distinctiveness, which in this demonstration was the word pineapple.

Unit 7- Cognition: My First Memory

The thought was vague; I recalled sitting in the dark room in the middle of a day, looking around, trying to find out if there is anyone who could not sleep like me. I was in pre kindergarten at the time. It was about noon and every child was taking a nap, which was the daily routine of our school. I was about 3 at then time. I remembered that I was kneeling down on the floor, waiting for the recess to be over, and that I could continue playing with my friends.

After having written down our memories into our blog, Mr. Anthony asked us to share some of our memories in class. Then, he categorized the memories into 3 kinds of emotional effect; positive, negative, and neutral. It can be seen that most of our first memories are ones that had strong emotional effect on us. In addition, he explained that the actual first memories can be recalled after the age of 5, and that most of the memories we had before that are the retelling of the adults, or from the stories shared in the family.