 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.