I guess I jumped the gun and gave the answer away in my title, but… does the loss of memory due to diseases like Alzheimer’s affect memory for music?
Typically in research fields, losing something allows us to understand how that something works. In this case, losing memory as a result of Alzheimer’s disease provides information on what is cognitively impaired as well as what is not impaired. So does losing your memory due to dementia impair memory for music? If evidence points to the answer no, perhaps there exists a unique memory system solely for music; but if evidence points to the answer yes, perhaps there still exists a unique memory system for music. That’s pretty confusing. I’ll make a valiant effort to explain what I mean by analyzing a psychological study. Kerer et al. (2013) seek to answer this main research question by examining explicit memory for music in individuals with and without cognitive impairment, including those with Alzheimer’s disease.
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Did somebody ever tell you not to be afraid of pressure because after all pressure is what turns coal into a diamond? This saying encourages us to embrace new challenges and to see pressure as a possibility to grow. In other words, if we manage stress well, we can transform ourselves from a lump of coal into a precious diamond. Accordingly, having a certain amount of pressure in our lives can help us to excel. However, if the pressure becomes too much, we freeze and are overwhelmed by a task.
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It’s a given that as college students, we all feel tired from time to time. Well, maybe more than from time to time. Walking across campus, have you ever heard people saying things like “I got two hours of sleep last night,” “I slept terribly last night,” “I’m going to pass out right now,” or something along those lines? I’m sure you have at some point. 
We have all heard that it’s important to get our sleep. This is partly because there has been a lot of research showing that our episodic memory, or memory for specific details and events, is better after a period of sleep. For example, if you were to go out on the town and attend a show, your memory for the details and events of that show would be better the next day if you got eight hours of sleep, as opposed to staying out in the city all night. One reason for this phenomenon is that a function of sleep is consolidation (Diekelmann & Born, 2010), or the neural process by which memories are strengthened and more permanently stored. The more sleep you get, the more consolidation occurs, and the better your memories become.
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Do you listen to music while you do assigned homework? Do you listen to music while you study? Do you listen to music while you are reading for class? If you are a college student I would assume that you said yes to at least one of these questions. As college student, when I am in the library or any public study space I often see the majority of my peers with headphones in while doing their work. Whether or not they are all just trying to avoid talking to me, I will never know, but I usually assume that there is some sort of sound or music coming from the headphones. Often people’s reasoning for doing this is because they want to “tune out” all of the distractions and conversations happening around them. Furthermore, if they are “tuning out” all of the distracting sounds around them then they think they are successfully staying focused and internalizing whatever material they are working on.
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Has a smell ever made you remember a specific event or time in your life?
A lot of people tend to equate the smell of fresh baked cookies with their childhood. For me, the smell of a burning woodstove transports me to snowy days growing up in Vermont. Odors have the exceptional ability to instantaneously trigger vivid autobiographical memories—a phenomenon referred to as the Proust effect.
While other stimuli can also (obviously) make us recall past memories, they are usually not as detailed, sudden, or vivid as those related to smells. Certain smells can suddenly and involuntarily transport us to a specific time and place. What makes smells so special? Why wouldn’t looking at a picture of your childhood home have the same effect as smelling its scent?
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We’ve all been there before: It’s the end of the first semester at Colby College, your work is piling up, the temperature is plummeting amidst strong unrelenting and merciless winds, and sunshine is beginning to slip away at the premature hour of 4 pm. You just feel, well, bad. You are experiencing all of this negative emotion during this stressful time, and you can’t seem to shake it! Well, better get yourself a Happy Light to shoo away that Seasonal Affective Disorder because if you want your memory to be in tip-top shape so you can conquer your final exams, you may need to turn that frown upside down.
Previous research has suggested that memories of events that are infused with high levels of emotion can facilitate an individual’s ability to recall those memories (Brown & Kulik, 1977). Emotional events that occur in our everyday lives are usually remembered well, whereas neutral events do not reside as vividly in our memory. This phenomenon is evident in the existence of flashbulb memories, which are vivid and poignant memories of specific events that are assessed in the moment of the event, but are retained in long-term memory. For instance, you might have a visual snapshot of the time you labored for long hours to concoct a birthday cake for your Great Aunt Patricia, and then tripped over a small beetle, causing the cake to hurdle to its death on the unforgiving kitchen floor! Surely you are never going to forget that incident. (Even though you may desperately want to).
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Do you worry about what will happen to your body as you get older? Do you envision your brain slowing down and your grandkids speaking realllyy slllowwlyyy so you can understand them?
Cognitive functioning—which includes attention (allotting mental resources to notice something), memory (the process of encoding, storing, and retrieving information), and executive functioning (a broad term for the system that regulates many cognitive processes)—tends to decrease with age. However, one of the many benefits of exercise is that it has been shown to improve cognitive functioning. And for many older adults, general fitness as it relates to health is a primary concern. But some forms of exercise can be harmful or painful for older adults who have joint pain. So what kind of exercise and how much exercise should older adults get in order to stay physically and mentally healthy?
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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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