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.