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…
Girl Falls in Mall Water Fountain While Texting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wDBaV-mQyw
([wtfhub], 2011)
Watch the video above. Notice the woman falling flat on her face? Psychologists refer to instances, such as this epic camera-caught face-plant, as results of inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness refers to an individual’s failure to notice unexpected objects or events when she is focusing her attention on something else (Kellog, 2007). The widely accepted attenuation model of selective attention provides evidence for inattentional blindness. According to the attenuation model of selective attention, a person who does not attend to an object in her visual field likely does not perceive that object due to an attenuation filter. The attenuation filter functions to turn down the signal intensity from unattended stimuli in the environment while letting attended stimuli pass through it onto a perceptual channel, resulting in conscious awareness of the stimuli a person attends to (Kellog, 2007). In this video, the woman clearly was not paying attention to the fountain within her field of vision, so the information regarding the fountain in her sensory memory was tuned out via the attenuation filter, and the presence of the fountain never reached her conscious awareness.
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There’s no doubt that a large percentage of college students are sleep-deprived. When you have an exam to study for, a paper to write, two quizzes to study for the next day, you’re going to stay up late. You’ll sleep at 2:00 A.M. the earliest. 3:00 A.M. if you’re pushing it. Sleep is probably the last thing on your mind, but also the first thing your body wants and needs. It’s hard to go to sleep knowing you have these assignments to finish for the next day, but a quick nap might just be the rest you need!
We spend one-third of our lives sleeping (or at least attempting to fall asleep). There are five stages of sleep: stage 1, 2, 3, 4 and rapid eye movement (REM). Stage 1-4 sleep is called non-rapid eye movement (NREM). We won’t talk much about the differences in these sleep stages, but it’s said that the more hours of sleep one gets, the more REM sleep one gets. REM sleep is when most dreams occur during sleep. If we don’t get enough sleep, level of concentration and attention decreases, memory systems don’t work as efficiently, and motor and cognitive functions are negatively affected. Read more…
Have you ever wondered why when you plan to do something beforehand, you usually end up getting it done? For example, for something as minuscule as taking out the trash – the act of reminding yourself to do so or envisioning yourself taking out the trash (maybe don’t envision it…) is proven to help you complete tasks. This is called an implementation intention (II), i.e. the act of specifying when, where, and how you will perform a specific task or action. To carry out an II, you use an if-then structure, such as “If it rains, I will put on my raincoat.” The formation of II’s is confirmed to improve prospective memory, which is the ability to remember to perform a specific action at an intended time. As Peter Gollwitzer and Gabriele Oettingen write in their article (2013), “Successful goal pursuit requires solving both of two subsequent tasks: first, strongly committing to goals, and then, effectively implementing them.” However, what cognitive processes do you need to act on an II, and can people of all ages and conditions exhibit excellent prospective memory?
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“Attention is the holy grail, everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.” David Strayer, a University of Utah researcher, made the importance of attention very clear in this quote from a 2010 New York Times article. However, attention is not static, it can be focused, divided, shifted, widened and narrowed. With a narrowing of attention, very apparent changes or entire objects (even gorillas) can be completely missed even if you are looking directly at it (don’t believe me? Watch this). There are many ways to narrow your attentional breadth, or the “spotlight” of your attention in which you can notice stimuli with high accuracy. But what about the possibility of having a larger attentional spotlight, to be able to be aware of what is happening in a larger spatial area?
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Have you ever taken part in a “walking meeting”? People who work closely with Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, arguably two of the most successful and innovative people of our time, have probably experienced these on a regular basis. Both of these influential people are known for frequently having important business meetings while walking outside. They certainly have enough building space to hold a meeting inside, so why do they do this? Have they noticed something about walking that helps them think differently than if they were sitting in a meeting room? Walking is known to be beneficial for our physical health, but what about its effect on our cognitive functioning?
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When one thinks of heavy drinking, one usually jumps straight to college students, due to popular culture references and stereotypes that paint college as a breeding ground for excessive alcohol consumption. Despite their stereotypical nature, these assumptions do hold some weight. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) reports that approximately 80% of college students engage in alcohol consumption. This statistic can be seen playing out on the weekends here at Colby College, as well as at many other colleges around the country, when students put down their textbooks and start to drink. Many of them drink a lot, with approximately 50% of students who drink alcohol also engaging in binge drinking (NIAAA). Binge drinking is defined as four alcoholic drinks in two hours for women, and five alcoholic drinks in two hours for men (NIAAA). Heavy drinking, then, is when a person engages in binge drinking more than five times in a month. At Colby, it is not uncommon to hear of girls drinking over ten drinks in a night; boys, up to twenty. The effects of such risky behavior are often cited as being responsible for bad grades, poor social relationships and general unhappiness (NIAAA). Despite the repercussions of excessive drinking, many students laugh it off as “just a college thing,” and expect that they will go back to a normal, generally sober, life after graduation. But what if they don’t stop? Will the alcohol have a similar effect later in life?
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Let’s say you are given a standard short-term memory test. A list of words is presented to you; maybe 10 or 12 items, and you have to remember as many of them as you can at a later recall test. With the standard 5 to 9 item capacity of short-term memory, you can likely recall most of them. If you have time to use long-term memory, you can come up with a way to remember them all. There are plenty of useful mnemonics that can give you a hand, so let’s up the ante and make it 25 items. That’s a little bit tougher but, after a day with it, you can commit it to memory. People have to memorize things all the time, and we’ve found ways that are better than just repeated exposure. Memory is very dependent on cues and semantic connections, so creating those for certain bits of information is very helpful and not too hard. Let’s try one.
Toothpaste – Spider – Traffic – Mountain – Laser – Tuna – Calendar – Jacket – Pig – Cactus – Racquet – Leash
It’s not expected that you can remember all of these items based on short-term memory alone, so let’s use a quick mnemonic technique. Imagine a place that you are very familiar with, like your house, and picture the items on the list in various places in your house as you read them. You can do this very quickly if it’s a familiar place, and it helps to construct a specific path. For example, maybe you walk up to your house and there’s a tube of toothpaste sitting on the front doorstep. Maybe a spider crawls onto it as you’re looking at it, or maybe you see it as you reach for the door. You open the door and there’s someone else there who is trying to leave, causing traffic. There’s a painting of a mountain on the wall, or if you’re not too concerned about the constraints of reality you can just place an actual mountain in your living room. Later when you try to recall the words, you can just mentally walk through your house and find the objects there just where you put them. This is called the Method of Loci. Using this technique, you can create cues out of locations and remember this list after possibly just one presentation. Read more…
Have you ever looked at a picture from when you were younger and had absolutely no memory of it? Or have you ever had a memory from when you were young that you’re not sure actually happened? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then you are completely normal and with this rest of us who sometimes have trouble recalling memories from our childhood and whether or not certain events actually took place. If these events never really happened, then why do we remember them? Memories for things that did not actually happen are called false memories, more specifically implanted memories, and psychologist have been researching false memories for years. Many researchers looks at implanted memories, a phenomenon that refers to participants recalling specific details about “memories” that actually never took place. In implanted memory studies, researchers ask participants about specific events that took place during childhood, such as if they ever got lost at a park. Imagine being a participant in one of these studies. The first day that you come in, a researcher asks you about whether or not you ever got lost at the park when you were younger. You can’t remember ever being lost in the park, so you reply no. You continue to go in to see the researcher for multiple weeks, and every time the researcher asks you about being lost in the park when you were a kid. After a few weeks, you start to remember that actually, you were lost in the park when you were a kid and can remember specific details of being lost. This is how implanted memory studies take place, and by the end of a few weeks, researchers find that most participants start to recall specific details of events that never took place (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995). Crazy, isn’t it?
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