It’s a Saturday afternoon and you bunker down on your sofa to watch a marathon of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Your mom calls and asks you to check if she left the stove on. The average person may remember already checking the stove that morning and can feel confident that their memory is correct. “All is good mom— No need to get off this couch and check.” An individual with OCD (a mental disorder that impairs daily life via obsessions and compulsions) is mostly likely going to go to the kitchen and double-check even though they have this feeling of knowing that they had previously checked it. Thoughts such as “maybe I actually checked the stove yesterday instead of this morning” may cross your mind; you will ultimately be forced to get off the couch and check the stove to appease mom (and your own anxieties).
This example highlights the self-doubt that OCD can create. When you think about people with OCD, you may refer to the classic germaphobe that performs compulsive hand-washing rituals. No matter how many times they wash their hands, the “clean” feeling is never achieved. People with OCD whose obsessions revolved repeated checking also lack a feeling of satisfaction or resolution—the stove doesn’t feel like it was off after the first check or maybe you remembered the first check incorrectly and thus the vicious cycle of compulsive checking begins. As repeated checking persists, recollection shifts from “remembering” (having exact accounts of when/how an event happened) to “knowing” (having a general idea of what happened). Read more…
How well do you remember the highly emotional events of your life? People generally hold strong and vivid memories of these events, both happy, like one’s first kiss, or sad like the death of a family member. Research has shown that memories are highly susceptible to distortion through time and suggestion. Emotion plays a large role in memory. Our experiences are always being shaped by our moods and emotions at that time. Evidence has shown that emotional information and events are remembered better and more vividly, but are more susceptible to distortion. There has been great quantity of research done on emotion’s effect on memory and suggestion’s effect on memory, but very little on the effect that emotion has on suggestion of memory. A 2014 study by Ilse Van Damme and Karolien Smets took a look at that phenomenon. The study was interested in false memories and the factors that produce them.
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How good are your survival instincts?
It has been seven scores and sixteen years (or 156 years for people uninterested in the Lincoln reference) since Darwin first outlined “survival of the fittest” in his theory of natural selection and evolution. Even then, the term was taken to apply mostly to animals – and our evolutionary ancestors perhaps, but much less to human beings. Do we care about survival? Definitely; but certainly in a different way than a snake or a hawk might care about survival. Are we selected for? Perhaps, but certainly not in the way peppered moths are selected for in the industrial parts of England. The thing that makes us stand apart from the rest of nature is that other species, for the most part, must adapt to their environments, whereas human beings have made an atrocious name for ourselves for adapting our environments to us.
Thus, nowadays, survival of the fittest, when applied to humans, often takes on a much more socially constructed meaning than the theory it originated from. When an employer chooses a more versatile worker in hopes of getting more work done with fewer employees, we shrug our shoulders at the poor rejectees and say “survival of the fittest”. When someone who is drunk and decides to try and climb a vending machine falls and injures his leg, we laugh and say “survival of the fittest”. The term has come to embody the ideal of being social apt, versatile, and smart enough not to make self-endangering decisions. In any case, for the inhabitants of first world countries who get to sit in class and learn about Darwin, actually having to survive in the wild (as the term was originally about) is no more than a bizarre gag evoked by the flight attendant before a flight across Australia. After all, where is the relevance of “wilderness survival” instincts in a world of supermarkets and movie theaters?
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Many people sacrifice sleep in order to finish that last little bit of work, but it turns out that you may be better off just going to sleep. Few people realize the harmful effects of developing a habit of forgoing sleep. A recent study conducted by Bawden, Oliveira, and Caramelli (2011) reveals that continued sleep deprivation can have an adverse effect on an individual’s executive functioning, attention, and memory. Executive functioning is essentially an individual’s management system. It is responsible for directing attention, planning, and regulating mental representations (an individual’s mental image of reality). These functions are among the most important in carrying out daily life, and people that deprive their bodies of sufficient sleep may be cultivating a ticking time-bomb.
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Have you ever been in a life or death experience? Walked across a bear in the woods? Almost been eaten by a tiger? Gotten in a car crash? Did you find your memory of this event to be clear and accurate, possibly almost like slow motion? Have you made that mistake again, or been more careful in similar settings? Recent studies have shown that the human memory system evolved to afford us a survival advantage (Nairne et al. 2008.) This functional analysis of memory explains that the purpose of memory is to remember the best way to survive. Humans need to accurately remember what situations pose a threat to them so they can successfully avoid those situations in the future.
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When I was in fourth grade we had the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument in school. Between band and orchestra we were allowed to select any instrument of our choice and we received music lessons every Friday afternoon at the end of the school day. These instruments were like toys to us. Instead of hanging in the classroom and silently doing our math worksheets we were able to make loud noises with trumpets, violins, and drums. We would get so excited every Friday afternoon because we got to skip out on time normally spent sitting at our desks – we got what we thought was a break from learning.
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What classes do I sign up for? Which restaurant do I want to eat at? How much money is appropriate to spend on a birthday gift? Which is the best highway to take to get home? Whether we realize it or not, decision-making is an essential daily function. We rely on our decision-making abilities to guide us through our actions. But what affects these abilities? Data has shown that individuals with Anorexia Nervosa (AN) and Bulimia Nervosa (BN) have long-term difficulty in decision-making. While serious eating disorders such as AN and BN can have short-term effects such as drastic weight loss and skewed self-image, it is also important to consider the long-term effects that these diseases may have. While some may think that rehabilitation of these diseases mainly involve the process of eating healthy and emotional and mental rehabilitation, rehabilitation, as this article proves, must reach far beyond for these individuals. Differences in decision-making are an important aspect to explore, as treatment in later stages of the disease should be adjusted to these findings. Chan et al.’s study demonstrated the effects of these diseases on what could be life-changing decisions.
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The act of recalling–we do it so casually and frequently without much thought; whether it’s recalling questions from an exam when you are discussing with friends questions you couldn’t figure out, or subconsciously remembering what the acquaintance was like while hearing rumors about him/her. Recalling might not be all so good–at least not as much as we might think it is. We don’t usually question the accuracy of the information we take in. However, it turns out to be that the accuracy of information becomes important, especially after the act of recalling (retrieving any information from memory). Through recalling an event, we enhance our ability to take in new information relevant to the event; if the new information is an accurate account of the event, our accuracy on the memory of the event is enhanced, but if the information is misleading or wrong, we take in the misleading information into our memory as well as we do of an accurate event. In the case of discussing an exam question with a friend, if the friend gives you inaccurate information, your possibly accurate prior memory could be “overwritten” with the wrong information your friend just provided. And in the case of hearing a rumor about an acquaintance, you could have a positive memory about the person before, but because of the rumor, which might be right or wrong, your memory could paint a new picture of him/her over the positive image that you used to have. Without being aware, we are making ourselves susceptible to taking in misinformation through just a simple act of recall. This could become very problematic at times; especially in eyewitness testimonies where their account makes a huge impact on what could be decided in court.
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Can one memory define you?
Do memories shape us, or do we shape our memories? Can one event change your life forever?
Researcher Yochai Ataria from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem argues one traumatic event can change a person’s sense of self, and their identity. According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, “a traumatic event is an experience that causes physical, emotional, psychological distress, or harm. It is an event that is perceived and experienced as a threat to one’s safety or to the stability of one’s world.” Traumatic events can include a death of someone close to a person, hospitalization, terrorism, violence, physical injury, mass disasters, and other horrific events. Traumatic memories have the power seep into a person’s life, making it unable for the person to do anything but think of that event.
Maybe some of you have experienced a traumatic event, but I hope you haven’t. Unfortunately, I have. I watched my Dad pass as I held his hand. I often can’t get the image of him taking his last breath out of my mind, or the last time he said “I love you.”
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Don’t you wish you had perfect attention skills? That you could become so immersed in your studying that even hearing your name wouldn’t pull you away from the task at hand? The level of focus which you have for the task at hand is regulated by the central executive portion of the brain, where working memory is. Working memory has been studied extensively, and one example of research that demonstrates good working memory is called the cocktail party effect. This refers to the phenomenon of being in a busy room, yet still hearing your name from somewhere in the crowd, even when you are having your own conversation. When looking at the cocktail party effect, it was found that people with stronger working memory are less likely to hear their name said while in a busy room with lots of people. (Conway et al., 2001). This makes sense, because strong working memory would indicate that you are so absolutely immersed and focused on the conversation or task at hand that outside stimuli, such as your name, will not distract you. Working memory is different than short-term memory because it is much more active; it helps with reading comprehension, and has specialized parts for holding onto different types of information. Working memory is predictive of performance various activities, whereas short-term memory does not predict many cognitive processes. What is in your working memory is what you are thinking about right here and right now. Read more…
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