One in four: This is the proportion of Americans living today that have suffered from a diagnosable mental illness within the last year (“Mental Illness,” 2011). Examining this statistic, it is clear that the effects of mental illness are widespread. In the US, for example, costs for direct treatment of mental illness are estimated to be US$ 148 billion annually, and indirect economic costs – like lost employment (due to medical leave) and decreased productivity, are two to six times higher than that (Panthare, 2003).
If you yourself aren’t directly afflicted with a disorder, chances are someone in your immediate or extended family may be. The outward physical manifestations of these disorders may be minimal for those possessing them, making them seem at times like “invisible illnesses;” that is, you may not be able to tell that someone has one of these disorders simply by looking at them. Complicating things even further for individuals with a mental disorder, many who are afflicted may not have received a proper diagnosis or are struggling without professional medical help.
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We’ve all experienced it in some form. The sweaty palms, the pounding chest, the gasp of breath: the reliving of some unfortunate memory. Maybe it was a trip up the stairs, or a poorly executed class speech. These minor traumas delay our hectic lives for a moment; give us a second’s pause. But for some people, that pause lasts years instead of seconds.
So where is the distinction between these inconsequential daily events and a true trauma? What constitutes a true trauma for people our age? In 2006, Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin designed a study to establish that distinction between a trip up the stairs and Post Traumatic Stress. The formal American Psychiatric Association (APA) definition for PTSD is “a history of exposure to a traumatic event meeting two criteria and symptoms from each of three symptom clusters: intrusive recollections, avoidant/numbing symptoms, and hyper-arousal symptoms” (APA, 2000). In other words, a mental roadblock.
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“Most cases don’t turn on DNA evidence. Most turn on eyewitness testimony and admissions by defendants.”
—-District Attorney General of U.S.—Barry P. Staubus
It’s often said that seeing is believing, but many times our memories can be misleading or even completely inaccurate. It might be no big deal in our daily life to mistakenly remember something, but in a courtroom, it could possibly send an innocent man to prison or even to the electric chair. One of the most frequently used and widely accepted pieces of evidence in today’s trials is eyewitness testimony, in which a witness is asked to pick the potential suspect out of a lineup, or to describe the characteristics of the perpetrator so that the police could run it through the data base and come up with an ID. However, as our memories could potentially be inaccurate, eyewitness testimonies are not always 100 percent true. In a significant number of criminal trials, the identification could be completely wrong and because the witness is “very confident” about the identification, an innocent man would wind up in jail.
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If you’re on the computer reading this blog, there is almost a 100% chance that you also have Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube open on your computer as well. In today’s world, social networking sites have become an integral part of our everyday lives. Other than “stalking” photos, tweeting our every move, and watching cat videos, most people do not put a lot of thought into how social networking sites affect their lives. Tracy Packiam Alloway and Ross Geoffrey Alloway’s 2012 paper, “The impact of engagement with social networking sites (SNSs) on cognitive skills,” looks at the effects of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube use on working memory, attention skills, and reported levels of social connectedness.
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Have you ever heard the saying, “If I could remember school work like I remember lyrics, I’d be a genius?” It is true that many people remember an immense number of songs throughout their lifespan. Melodies for popular songs are almost unforgettable, and learned lyrics can stay in memory for a lifetime (Bartlett and Snelus, 1980). Memory for songs is contained in two stores that have two separate functions: episodic and semantic memory. Episodic memory allows you to remember the “when,” and “where,” of things, so recalling the first time you ever heard “Hey Jude” by the Beatles would use episodic memory. Semantic memory refers to remembering the facts and vital information about something – the “what” – but not being able to specifically recall when you learned that information. Remembering the lyrics and tune to “Hey Jude,” uses semantic memory. It is not necessary for you to remember the first (or last) time you heard the song in order for you to be able to sing along.
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We live in a world today that is constantly bombarding us with stimuli. Even a simple morning routine of getting to school or work shows how much information we have presented to us. Say we turn on the TV to look at traffic reports; we will see which celebrity is promoting his or her new film, which route to take and the new product we absolutely need to have. We have to make breakfast and get ourselves ready to leave. On the way there, we could run into advertisements on billboards and a new song we like on the radio. By the time we finally arrive, so much has been stored away in our memory. Yet how many times has it happened that we distinctly remembering hearing a specific song on the radio or which person was on the news that morning and someone else confidently tells us we are mistaken? How can we so strongly and vividly remember something when it did not happen at all?
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Regular exercise is known to have many advantages. In addition to the obvious physical benefits such as reducing the risks of heart disease and obesity, it can also benefit the brain. Regular aerobic exercise releases endorphins, a naturally occurring opiate, to improve an athlete’s mood. It also increases cognitive function in healthy adults, including improved working memory and executive functioning (Guiney & Machado, 2013). Marathon running, however, is above and beyond typical regular aerobic exercise; it is considered the ultimate test of fitness. The marathon always concludes the Olympic games, seeming to symbolize the pinnacle of athleticism. But to complete a marathon, runners put their bodies through the ringer. They run more mileage than the human body was probably ever designed to run, all in preparation for the 26.2-mile race. Though regular exercise has positive effects on both the body and the mind, could running a marathon actually be too much exercise? Beyond sore muscles, marathon runners often experience tendonitis, torn muscles and ligaments, sprains, stress fractures, shin splints, and other injuries. But might there also be negative cognitive effects of running a marathon?
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I wish I could have taken a picture of every student’s face that walked into Mr. B’s middle school history class on Friday morning. It was always a struggle to get up on Fridays because I knew that my first class of the day always meant it was time for a quiz. All of my peers despised Mr. B for his quizzes to make sure that we had been paying attention all week and that we were keeping up with the information. “Isn’t that what tests are for? Why do we have to take a quiz every week?”
Being tested frequently is something that students are most of the time not too fond of, but in the long run when you get the grade of your exam, you will thank the teachers that made you recall and tested you on the information learned every week! Recent research in cognitive psychology has provided strong evidence to support this notion.
Retrieval, the process by which information can be extracted from memory, is treated as an evaluative tool that reveals what people remember and what they have forgotten; retrieval shows what people know but it also changes what people know. From an educational perspective, it is important to understand that retrieval serves more than just the purpose of reinforcing memory of a tested fact! Cognitive psychologists have recently been seeking to provide educators with clear, effective advice on how to improve student learning.
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Learning names is a challenge for most of us, and we all occasionally have that one person we just can’t quite remember. But is there a pattern who we remember and who we don’t? If you belong to a minority, as I do, there’s probably been at least one time when you’ve probably been frustrated and offended because people seem to always confuse you with the few other members of your race. For example, I was one of the only two Asian girls in my high school. This inevitably led to teachers calling me Jane half the time, and Cathy the other half. But should we be offended? Or is there actual legitimacy behind this unintentional racism? The cross-race effect in memory is the idea that humans are actually better at remembering faces that are the same race as them, relative to other races. Hourihan, Fraundorf, and Benjamin further analyzed this effect in their 2013 study on how cross-race effect relates to face memory.
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Anyone who listens to country music will undoubtedly know and love Kenny Chesney’s song “I Go Back,” in which he sings about certain songs that remind him of different memories throughout his life. He croons about how “Jack and Diane” brings back vivid memories of his adolescence such as football and his first love, and how “Keep on Rockin Me Baby,” reminds him of trying to impress girls at bars in college. When listening to this song, you can’t help but think of your own songs that have “somehow stamped your life.” Maybe every time you hear that NSYNC song, you’re brought back to awkward middle school dances. Maybe “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” makes you smile at memories of your first boyfriend. Maybe, like Chesney, a country song brings you back to your summer high school days. In fact, for me, “I Go Back” itself brings back vivid memories of driving through back roads in a Jeep with my friends. One thing is for certain: songs have a significant power to bring back life memories. This leads us to wonder: What types of memories exactly do they bring back?
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