 What is the relationship between memory and selfhood?

The relationship between memory and selfhood is rather complex. We are whom we believe us to be, based upon the memories of the experiences.

Our selfhood is like a reflection of our experiences. However, our memories of the experiences are influenced by emotion and many other factors. Such characteristics of memories refract some of the understandings of our experiences and influence the idea of selfhood.

What new discovery about memory do you find most interesting?

The fact that traumatic events could be either be left in one’s memory as an indelible memory or be repressed or become amnesia was the more interesting discovery.

When an emotionally arousing event happens in one’s life, the hormonal activity causes neural activities, muscle tension, increase in heartbeat. Such activities will repeat each time one encounters similar situation. When the activities repeat each time, same hormonal and neuron paths of the memory will bind even tighter.

However, in cases of traumatic repression or amnesia, an emotionally arousing event is never consolidated in long-term memory and therefore one cannot recall it.

What is the homunculus crisis?

Memories are not stored in a specific location on the brain, but in various neural networks. However, what ignites the memories to come back are unknown. Memories are recalled through a vast range of neural activities in networks located in different sites of brain. The homunculus crisis is the mystery of what retriggers the complicated replication of neural activities.

Which theory of dreams finds support in the experiments by Lynch?

The cognitive theory of dreams by Winson finds support in the experiments by Lynch.

Winson argued that dreams are replay of daily experiences that helps us to remember what had happened during the day.

In Lynch’s experiment revealed that compared to the rats’ brain exploring in the maze, same brain cells’ fired when the rats were sleeping. This illustrates that rats brains work just as they are exploring the maze when they are sleeping and their learning enhances when they are sleeping.

How can some memories become indelible?

Most of the indelible memories are memories that involved strong emotional arousals. In such events, strong hormonal activities take place, which regulates muscle tension, strong heartbeat and neural paths in the brain. Then when one encounters a similar situation, the same hormonal activities will be repeated. However, when such activities are repeated, the memory is recalled binding the activities even tighter. When the memory that accompanies the activities is overly generalize and recalled restlessly, the binding will be so strong that it will not just be permanent but indelible.

How can amnesia and repression be explained?

Repression is when one cannot remember an event for a while and later retrieves it and amnesia is when an event was never encoded in the long-term memory.

When an explicit memory is recalled, it must first go through hippocampus. Since both amnesia and repression are both impairment in recalling explicit events, it suggests malfunction of hippocampus. Siegel thought that individuals “dissociate” themselves from the unbearable traumatic events, which then would cause either repression or amnesia.

Explain the following statement: "Memory is more reconstructive than reproductive."

“Memory is more reconstructive tan reproductive” means that details wear out in our memory as time passes but we can “reconstruct” the event to tell based on the general situation of the memory. John Neisser showed a great memory of what happened and what was said, general events, he mis-recalled the who said those, the details.

What new paradigm of memory is now emerging?

The new paradigm of memory says that memory is not an absolute recall of what one experienced but a complex mixture of emotion, experience, facts and opinions of one about oneself. Meaning that memories are altered by emotion at that time and facts when they are encoded and altered once again when they are retrieved by one’s opinion about oneself, and one’s experiences.

After reading this article, what conclusions can you make about memory?

After reading this article, I make a conclusion that no matter how vivid the memories are and how confident we are about them, memories are quite an unreliable source of a recall. It is greatly influenced by emotion and how it was retrieved, diction of the questions asked, mood of the day and etc, and we might even have a memory of an event that never happened.

Demonstration 5: Memory if often a Reconstruction

The class was asked to remember 10 shapes.
Then when we were about to recall the shapes Mr. Peter gave us a sheet with hints on it.
Although it didn't really work with Fik and I, the result of the test was supposed to be influenced by the hints on the sheet. For example, if the hint was diamond inside rectangle, the side of the interior shape of the rectangle should had been more straight than those who got the hint saying, window with curtains.

although that was the ideal of the experiment. there was barely any differences between my and my partner's recall of the shapes despite the different hints. I cannot really tell why that happened but MAYBE our class has been doing such test quite often that we are trained to remember stuff more accurately than before...... may be......

Demonstration 4:

4 people volunteered to participate in the demonstration.
Mr. Peter read the story to the first person and he told the story to the next person and so on.

As the story was passed on, the story started to change and at the end it was changed quite a bit.
The story was leveled. A quite a detailed story was simplified into a story. Number of the flight stayed for a while but turned into the flight time at the end and the model number of the gun disappeared at the first person and some other details such as radio-ing BKK, people's revolutionary army, angry passengers jumping at the hijacker(?) were lost.

When some details got lost, some got emphasized. The microphone thrown to the hijacker, change of destination to Cuba and name of the gun, although it was changed. these details or information, are weird thus they stood out from the rest and were emphasized. (Sharping)

Some of the changed details were based on the scheme of the person retelling the story. Roland thought there are two pilots in a cockpit and there he invented another pilot in the cockpit. This illustrates assimilation

Demonstration 3: Meaning Enhances Recall Experiment

In this activity, two different sets of words were paired with either A or B and we were asked to count the number of syllables of the words paired with A and decide whether the word is pleasant or unpleasant.
When we decide whether the words are pleasant or unpleasant we are giving meaning to each word. When counting syllables does not have any link to hook on to our memory.
It was quite obvious that we should remember words that we had to give meaning to it. However, I remembered equal numer of A and B words. Although I did not give any meaning to the words I had to count the syllables, I drew an imaginary line in between syllables so that it will be easier to count the words and that imaginary lines had, perhaps, encoded into my memory as visual input because i remembered some words because I remembered where I drew the imaginary line for the word.

The result of the demonstration was quite interesting. Before we collect the results, we all thought the results will form a bell-shape, but it actually turned out to form bimodal shape. This and James got full score. This clearly shows that memory is also influenced by individual abilities.

Video: Remembering and Forgetting

Our memory is capable of 100 trillion things but we also forget.
Factors that affect remembering are: concentration and rehearsal and motivation( to remember and forget) and physical state. If one has bad condition that day one will not remember as well as other days.
In remembering new information, we need some kind of already existing memory to link on other wise it will be really hard to remember. When we receive new information, our brain organize it according to its meaning in order and a certain organization so that it will be easy to remember.

input encoded -> short term memory -> long term memory -> retrieved when needed.

Long term memory is basically limitless. It is like library but memories are not stored like books but stored like linked network. It is a passive memory storehouse

Short term memory holds all the memories in use, which means that the memories from long term memory goes through short term during retrieval. However, memories stay for a short time in short term memory. As soon as the focus of attention changes the memories are no longer in use therefore will be lost and can save. However, more information can be held in the short term memory through the process called chunking.

PEG is a technique of relating two unrelated words together to form and story. BY using this technique, we create one story which has some "meaning" therefore we can remember it better.

Sigmund Freud stated that how and what u remember is determined by who we are and what we know already because re learn things by relating new information to the old information.

Scheme is how all the memories are set into.

Demonstration 2: Words
Mr. Peter read out words and we were asked to remember them.
After hearing the first few words I kind of gave up since there were just too many of them, i thought. When the list of words ended, Mr. Peter asked how many people can remember each words. The graph of number of people who can remember words from the beginning to the end seemed like to form a curve going down and up. This is due to the position effect. That we tend to remember things near the beginning and the end.
However, I was able to remember "pineapple" this clearly shows that distinctive item are more easily registered into memory.
He also demonstrated dejavu effect. Because some of the words were related to sleep, some people, including I, imagined that we heard the word "sleep".
The average number of words people can remember was 7, again, which is the average number of information we can store at a time.

Demonstration 1: short term memory

We were asked to remember series of numbers and write them down after Mr. Peter read them to us. I managed to remember upto 7 digits of numbers.
We can remember 7 + or - 2 things at a time which means that my memory was right at the average. However there are people who can remember more things and there was a student in his class who managed to remember up to 12 digits of number.
A trick that can help us remember series of information is by grouping or chunking them.
If we group 12 digits into 4 groups of 3 digits then we will have only 4 information to remember instread of 12 information.

My First Memory:

I was between 3 and 2.
I was out playing and when i got back home, the door was locked.
The door was tile with glass, so i thought i could get into hosue if i break the glass on the door
so i picked up a stone and threw it to the glass.
after throwing it, i realized i cant get in and i got scared i will get scolded by mom
So i stood there crying and when mom got there she laughed and didnt scold me but soothe me.

In the class discussion we found out that most of people's first memories were concentrated in age interval of 3 to 4 and most of the memories accompanied a strong emotional impact.
However, we found out that most of the "memories" generated from stories heard and pictures we saw, and that those memories are not very reliable.