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.