Memory is a strange thing. Just using the verb “smash” in a question about a car crash instead of “bump” or “hit” causes witnesses to remember higher speeds and more serious damage. Known as the misinformation effect, it is a serious problem for police trying to gather accurate accounts of a potential crime. There’s a way around it, however: get a robot to ask the questions. […]

Two groups - one with a human and one a robot interviewer - were asked identical questions that introduced false information about the crime, mentioning objects that were not in the scene, then asking about them later. When posed by humans, the questions caused the witnesses’ recall accuracy to drop by 40 per cent - compared with those that did not receive misinformation - as they remembered objects that were never there. But misinformation presented by the NAO robot didn’t have an effect.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon—the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years. Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them—memories, especially, of my boyhood in London before World War II. […]

I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal, but assumed that the memories I did have—especially those that were very vivid, concrete, and circumstantial—were essentially valid and reliable; and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not. […]

“You never saw it,” Michael repeated. “We were both away at Braefield at the time. But David [our older brother] wrote us a letter about it. A very vivid, dramatic letter. You were enthralled by it.” Clearly, I had not only been enthralled, but must have constructed the scene in my mind, from David’s words, and then appropriated it, and taken it for a memory of my own. […]

All of us “transfer” experiences to some extent, and at times we are not sure whether an experience was something we were told or read about, even dreamed about, or something that actually happened to us. […]

It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else.

{ NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Phil Stern, Robert Aldrich, Casting Pin Up Girl for “Attack,” 1947 }

What is memory for? Episodic memory enables one to capture the precise details of an experience, and then to recollect this information rapidly whenever and wherever needed. Typical examples of its evolutionary value focus on the individual navigating the world, but the advantages conferred by episodic memory may be more far-reaching than often appreciated. For example, interactions with other people are important for our survival and wellbeing. Might episodic memory be crucial for establishing and/or maintaining interpersonal relationships? To address this question, we examined social relationships in three amnesic patients.

{ Frontiers | Continue reading }

As we age, it just may be the ability to filter and eliminate old information – rather than take in the new stuff - that makes it harder to learn, scientists report.

“When you are young, your brain is able to strengthen certain connections and weaken certain connections to make new memories,” said Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, neuroscientist. It’s that critical weakening that appears hampered in the older brain, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports. […]

“We know we lose the ability to perfectly speak a foreign language if we learn than language after the onset of sexual maturity. I can learn English but my Chinese accent is very difficult to get rid of. The question is why,” Tsien said.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Achim Lippoth }

Many children spontaneously report memories of ‘past lives’. For believers, this is evidence for reincarnation; for others, it’s a psychological oddity. But what happens when they grow up?

Icelandic psychologists Haraldsson and Abu-Izzedin looked into it. They took 28 adults, members of the Druze community of Lebanon. They’d all been interviewed about past life memories by the famous reincarnationist Professor Ian Stephenson in the 70s, back when they were just 3-9 years old. Did they still ‘remember’? […]

As children they reported on average 30 distinct memories of past lives. As adults they could only remember 8, but of those, only half matched the ones they’d talked about previously.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

photo { Taryn Simon }

Neuroscientists from New York University and the University of California, Irvine have isolated the “when” and “where” of molecular activity that occurs in the formation of short-, intermediate-, and long-term memories. Their findings, which appear in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer new insights into the molecular architecture of memory formation and, with it, a better roadmap for developing therapeutic interventions for related afflictions.

{ NYU | Continue reading }

Newly formed emotional memories can be erased from the human brain. This is shown by researchers from Uppsala University in a new study now being published by the academic journal Science. The findings may represent a breakthrough in research on memory and fear. […]

When a person learns something, a lasting long-term memory is created with the aid of a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. When we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a while and is then restabilized by another consolidation process. In other words, it can be said that we are not remembering what originally happened, but rather what we remembered the last time we thought about what happened. By disrupting the reconsolidation process that follows upon remembering, we can affect the content of memory.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Samad Ghorbanzadeh }

If you’ve ever wondered why you can remember some things from long ago yet can’t recall what you ate for dinner last night, a new study led by psychologists at the University of Toronto may help.

How much something means to you actually influences how you see it – as well as how vividly you can recall it later – the study shows.

“We’ve discovered that we see things that are emotionally arousing with greater clarity than those that are more mundane,” says Rebecca Todd. […] “Whether they’re positive – for example, a first kiss, the birth of a child, winning an award – or negative, such as traumatic events, breakups, or a painful and humiliating childhood moment that we all carry with us, the effect is the same.”

“What’s more, we found that how vividly we perceive something in the first place predicts how vividly we will remember it later on,” says Todd. “We call this ‘emotionally enhanced vividness’ and it is like the flash of a flashbulb that illuminates an event as it’s captured for memory.”

{ University of Toronto News | Continue reading }

related { Scientists Confirm that Memories of Music Are Stored in Different Part of Brain than Other Memories }

photo { René Magritte, Éclipse Solaire, 1935 }

Memories merge into memories. Byatt’s grandmother’s vivid remembering becomes the granddaughter’s vivid imagining. Who can tell the difference? In time, we might become so convinced by other people’s descriptions of their memories that we start to claim them as our own. If the experimental conditions are set up correctly, it turns out to be rather simple to give people memories for events they never actually experienced.

A well-known series of experiments by the American cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues at the University of Washington has shown that presenting participants with misleading information after they have experienced an event can change their memory of the event. […]

A recent neuroimaging study has provided some of the first clues to the neural mechanisms involved when our memories are shaped by other people. […] The scan findings showed that persistent memory errors, which went on to become part of the subjects’ own retelling of the story, were associated with greater activation in the hippocampus (the brain region primarily responsible for laying down episodic memories) than transient errors, which seemed to be more about conforming to a public account of the events. The researchers also showed that the amygdala (a part of the brain responsible for emotional memory) was particularly active when the participants thought that the information had come from other people, as compared with computer-generated representations. They suggested that the amygdala, so closely connected to the hippocampus, may play a specific role in the process by which social influences shape our memories. […]

A team of British researchers recently conducted the first scientific study of “nonbelieved memories”: memories which people cease to believe after coming to realise that they are false.

{ Independent | Continue reading }

photo { Tim Geoghegan }

People can be trained to forget specific details associated with bad memories, according to breakthrough findings that may usher the way for the development of new depression and post-traumatic stress disorder therapies. […]

Researchers found that individuals were still able to accurately recall the cause of the event even after they’ve been trained to forget the consequences and personal meaning associated with the memory.

{ Medical Daily | Continue reading }

Scientists have now found the engram, the physical trace of memory in the brain. […]

Decades of scientific dogma asserted that engrams exist only in vast webs of connections, not in a particular place but in distributed neural networks running widely through the brain. Yet a series of pioneering studies have demonstrated that it is possible to lure specific memories into particular neurons, at least in mice. If those neurons are killed or temporarily inactivated, the memories vanish. If the neurons are reactivated, the memories return. These same studies have also begun to explain how and why the brain allocates each memory to a particular group of cells and how it links them together and organizes them—the physical means by which the scent of a madeleine, the legendary confection that sparked Marcel Proust’s memory stream, leads to remembrance of things past. […]

“We have now gotten to the point that we know enough about memory and how memories are formed that we can actually find the engram, and by finding it, we can manipulate it,” says neurobiologist Alcino Silva.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

image { Stefano Colombini }

The way that children reason about the world, there’s a lot of good evidence to suggest that there are domains of knowledge: physical, reasoning about the physical world; biological, reasoning about the living world; and reasoning about the psychological world. Those three domains are the physics, the biology and the psychology, and are deemed to cover the majority of what we do when we’re thinking about concepts. […]

This is work I’ve done with Paul Bloom. We initially started looking at sentimental objects, the emergence of this bizarre behavior that you find in children in the West. They form these emotional attachments to blankets and teddy bears and it initially starts off as an associative learning type of situation where they need to self-soothe, because in the West we typically separate children, for sleeping purposes, between one and two years of age. In the Far East they don’t, they keep children well into middle childhood, so they don’t have as much attachment object behavior. It’s common, about three out of four children start off with this sort of attachment to particular objects and then it dissipates and disappears.

What Paul and I are interested in is whether or not it was the physical properties of the object or if there was something about the identity or the authenticity of the object which is important. We embarked on a series of studies where we convinced children we had a duplicating machine, and basically we used conjuring tricks to convince the child that we could duplicate any physical object. We have these boxes which looked very scientific, with wires and lights, and we place an object in one, and activate it, and after a few seconds the other box would appear to start up by itself and you open it up and you see you’ve got two identical objects. The child spontaneously said, “Oh, it’s like a copying machine.” It’s like a photocopier for objects, if you like. Once they’re in the mindset this thing can copy, we then test what you can get away with. They’re quite happy to have their objects, their toys copied, but when it comes to a sentimental object like a blanket or a teddy bear, then they’re much more resistant to accepting the duplicate. […]

Also, we’re getting into the territory of authenticity and identity. There are some fairly old philosophical issues about what confers identity and uniqueness, and these are the principles, quiddity and haecceity. I hadn’t even heard of these issues until I started to research into it, and it turns out these obscure terms come from the philosopher Duns Scotus. Quiddity is the invisible properties, the essence shared by members of a group, so that would be the ‘dogginess’ of all dogs. But the haecceity is the unique property of the individual, so that would be Fido’s haecceity or Fido’s essence, which makes Fido distinct to another dog, for example.

These are not real properties. These are psychological constructs, and I think the reason that people generate these constructs is that when they invest some emotional time or effort into an object, or it has some significance towards them, then they imbue it with this property, which makes it irreplaceable, you can’t duplicate it. […]

The sense of personal identity, this is where we’ve been doing experimental work showing the importance that we place upon episodic memories, autobiographical memories. […] As we all know, memory is notoriously fallible. It’s not cast in stone. It’s not something that is stable. It’s constantly reshaping itself. So the fact that we have a multitude of unconscious processes which are generating this coherence of consciousness, which is the I experience, and the truth that our memories are very selective and ultimately corruptible, we tend to remember things which fit with our general characterization of what our self is. We tend to ignore all the information that is inconsistent. We have all these attribution biases. We have cognitive dissonance. The very thing psychology keeps telling us, that we have all these unconscious mechanisms that reframe information, to fit with a coherent story, then both the “I” and the “me”, to all intents and purposes, are generated narratives.

{ Bruce Hood/Edge | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Fisher }

A good memory is typically seen as a powerful advantage, an aid to intelligence and socializing. But when experience is traumatic, this asset may become a serious liability, according to new research on survivors of the Rwandan genocide.

Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland studied a gene for a protein called PKCA, which is known to be involved in the encoding of emotional memories. […]

According to the study, the findings point to a “genetic link between the predisposition to build strong memory and the risk for post-traumatic stress disorder.”

The research also adds to increasing evidence that many “positive” genes also have a downside — and similarly, many “negative” ones have an upside. For example, one gene linked with a tendency for children to share treats with others is also linked to ADHD and later in life, promiscuity and addiction.

{ Time | Continue reading }

photo { Juergen Teller }

Well-meaning friends and family members may suggest that you have a couple of drinks after living through a stressful event. A friend of mine had a bike accident recently that sent her over a car door and miraculously left her with only a few bruises. Having a couple of drinks immediately after this will of course dull her nerves, since ethanol is an anxiolytic. But is it really a good idea to get tipsy (or worse) after living through a stressful event?

lt’s well known that acute stress modulates memory in a powerful way. People who have lived through a traumatic event will often either have either perfect photographic memory of the event or partial or total amnesia. Untreated, exposure to a traumatic event can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which causes long-term problems. There exist preventive treatments that, when applied immediately after the traumatic event, have been shown to decrease the likelihood of getting PTSD. This includes antagonists of adrenaline and NMDA receptors; this messes with the acquisition of memory.

Of course good ol’ beer will mess with the acquisition of memory; that’s why people get brownouts and blackouts. It is also an antagonist of NMDA receptors (among many other systemic effects). So given that alcohol is an anxiolytic and that it causes amnesia, it doesn’t seem such a stretch to think that having a beer right after very a stressful event (within the next, say, 6 hours) will decrease the likelihood of long-term negative consequences (say, developing a phobia of biking).

This is of course the sort of hypothesis that is very hard to get funding to test. We do know that PTSD sufferers frequently turn to alcohol after their trauma and that this negatively affects outcome. And drowning your sorrows is never the solution. To be clear, taking an anxiolytic and amnesiac acutely to avoid acquiring a potentially adverse memory of a traumatic event and taking it in a sustained way after the memory is consolidated to drown it out are two completely different things.

{ xcorr | Continue reading }

artwork { Joel Shapiro, Untitled, 1980 }

Brain neuroimaging studies continue to outline the structural and functional abnormalities in disorders of mood. A relatively consistent finding has been a reduced volume of the brain hippocampus in major depressive disorder. Studies of hippocampal volume in the less common bipolar disorder have been inconsistent–some studies have found reduced hippocampal volumes while others have not.

The hippocampus is an important brain region to understand in the mood disorders. The hippocampus has a key role in memory. Patients with mood disorders commonly display impairments in mood including deficitis in autobiographical memory. Unipolar depression appears to increase risk for later development of Alzheimer’s disease. Hippocampal volume reduction is a common finding in Alzheimer’s disease. (…)

Lithium is noted to have significant neuroprotective effects.  (…) It is possible that bipolar patients treated with lithium may experience less hippocampal atrophy than those not treated with lithium.

{ Brain Posts | Continue reading }

charcoal on paper { Marius de Zayas, John Marin and Alfred Stieglitz, ca. 1912–13 }

Among the most surprising discoveries about memory has been the realisation that remembering a past event is not like picking a DVD off the shelf and playing it back. Remembering involves a process of reconstruction. We store assorted features of an event as representations that are distributed around the brain.

In simple terms, visual features are represented near the back of the brain in the areas specialised for visual processing; sounds in auditory processing regions close to the ears; and smells in the olfactory system that lies behind the nose.

To experience the rich, vivid “re-living” of a past event that is remembering, we fit these features together into a representation of what took place.

A lot of stuff happens in our lifetimes, and so it makes sense that our brains would have evolved some efficient memory strategies. We don’t try to remember every single event in its entirety. Instead, we store the elements of an event, and put them together in different ways to make different memories. The downside is that similar events that share a number of features may be more difficult to remember.

Our experiment was designed to investigate this effect.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

artwork { Sougwen Chung | Thanks Tim }

How to actually be good at rote memorization. A group of psychologists decided to help the kids out by examining the optimal duration for studying a particular item. (…)

Subjects who avoided the longest (16s) and shortest (1s) durations retained more information when testeed after 5 minutes and when tested after 2 days. (…)

Performance was much better for intermediate (e.g., 4 s) presentation durations.

I bring up this study not because it’s crucial for our education system, but because in the future every part of our lives will be designed based on this type of research. Advertisements, online dating profiles, and all manner of printed instructions will be optimized for the perfect exposure length.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

When we watch a show on stage, TV or movie, we do the little trick of suspending disbelief. We do not believe what we are experiencing but we treat the content ‘as if we believed it’ for the duration of the show. We can re-enter that disbelieved experience if we choose, as if it were a memory of something that actually happened. The show can have lasting effects on how we view the world and interact with others. It has all the hallmarks of a really personal experience except that we know it is fictional. (…) What is the difference between this sort of memory and what we call false-memory? It is only the believe that the events remembered actually happened to us.

According to a recent paper, belief and memory are separate processes. We can have: memories that we believe were events, memories that we do not believe were events, beliefs about events that we do not remember, and events that we neither believe nor remember. (…)

The authors found that belief is easier to modify than memory. It is easier to create a false belief in a subject that it is to create a false memory. And likewise, it is easier to destroy a false belief than a false memory.

{ Thoughts on thoughts | Continue reading }

Several studies suggest that memories can be pharmaceutically dampened. For example, researchers recently showed that a drug called ZIP causes cocaine-addicted rats to forget the locations where they had regularly been receiving cocaine. Other drugs, already tested in humans, may ease the emotional pain associated with memories of traumatic events.

Many are alarmed by the prospect of pharmaceutical memory manipulation. In this brief comment, I argue that these fears are overblown. Thoughtful regulation may someday be appropriate, but excessive hand-wringing now over the ethics of tampering with memory could stall research into promising methods of preventing and treating post-traumatic stress.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

photo { Nigel Shafran, Moonflower, 1990 }

The hippocampus is the part of the brain that’s responsible for learning, storing memories and associating them with feelings and emotions. Within the hippocampus lies the dentate gyrus, which is where adult neurogenesis takes place — the formation of new neurons throughout adulthood. The middle layer of the dentate gyrus contains a type of neurons called granule cells. These are constantly generated and take a few weeks to develop and integrate in the dentate gyrus network.

Marin-Burgin et al. asked the following question:

Is it solely the continuous addition of new neurons to the network that is important, or are there specific functional properties only attributable to new granule cells (GCs) that are relevant to information processing?

{ Chimeras | Continue reading }