Do you remember that top hit from your favorite 90s boy band that you listened to on your CD player in 4th grade? Now can you recall that song on the radio that you listened to last week while driving to Colby College on I-95? Chances are, you will remember every last word of that pop song from a decade ago, but you cannot remember anything about that song you heard very recently while driving past endless pine trees. It may seem counter intuitive that certain songs from the distant past are ingrained in memory much better than the latest hits. However, past research has shown that memory and emotion are closely linked, and memory can be enhanced when correlated with powerful emotions (Laird et al., 1982). Music can be an effective catalyst in eliciting strong emotion, and people use music as a way to derive emotional responses. For example, people listen to upbeat and lively music when they want to socialize at parties, and movies play sad, slow music in a minor key during tragic moments. To examine whether emotion can have an effect on the ability to remember songs, Stephanie M. Stalinski and E. Gleen Schellenberg, investigated whether “liking” a song is correlated with the ability to remember it at a later point in time.
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I remember my cousin giving me tips on how to be left alone while riding the subway. “Wear a hooded sweatshirt that is too big for you,” Chris said, “and also wear headphones with music too loud, rap is always good. And put on a mean look, like you’re not someone to mess with; be unfriendly. No one wants to mess with me when I do that, they take one look at me and they stay away. It usually gets me a bench all to myself.” At first, hearing this surprised me. I couldn’t believe that people were that quick to judge others but I found myself thinking of all the times I had ridden on the bus or train. With one glance at someone I was able to make judgments on whether or not to sit near them. Chris’ description of how to keep people away fit my own judgment of who to stay clear of. That was when I first realized how much people rely on first impressions. Most times, our first impressions are based on the appearance of a person; their physical appearance. Our judgments are usually quick and automatic and don’t necessarily change until we interact with the other person more.
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Have you ever found yourself thinking about a future event, or pictured a specific incident in the future? Have you ever had a coach ask you to imagine making the perfect shot on goal or running the best race of your life? This type of thinking is called episodic future thinking, which is when your brain stops thinking about the present and instead moves into the world of a possible future. When we “pre-experience” the future, we can imagine ourselves in a specific setting with other people, performing certain actions. Thinking about the future is similar in some ways to re-experiencing the past. This is important, as the belief that a particular event could possibly occur in the future influences our behavior and decisions.
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Do you ever catch yourself thinking back to experiences from your past – happy, triumphant, gloomy memories? Perhaps, you sometimes imagine what life could present you down the road, where you’ll be 5, 10, 15 years down the line. Research into mental time travel (MTT) – the manner of mentally travelling back in time to relive past personal events or forward in time to imagine possible autobiographical events in the future, suggests that past and future MTT operate along similar principles, mostly in that people tend to recall events dated close to the present regardless of direction. However, differences have been observed as well; future events have been found to involve more of an observer perspective (as opposed to first-person) and refer less frequently to specific events, while they’re generally more personally important and relevant to the person’s self-identity. In other words, MTT into the future is based more upon the creation of potential circumstances in terms of one’s own personal representation of the world based on prior experiences, while MTT into the past is based on actual recollection of past events. The present study (Miles and Berntsen, 2011) aimed to further investigate future versus past MTT in response to different types of sensory cues. It focused on odor cues, as it has been claimed that odors are uniquely encoded and maintained in memory. Thus, it was expected that memories evoked in response to various smells should be different from those evoked via verbal or visual cues.
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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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Have you ever completed a task but later you were unable to articulate what you did in order to succeed? For example, after I have completed a complicated math problem, I am typically unable to explain in words how I arrived at my answer. When this occurs, we are said to have implicit knowledge of the task rather than explicit knowledge of the task. In other words, the knowledge that is evident in our behavior but it is unavailable through speech. When I am unable to explain or articulate something, I often find myself gesturing or using my hands. In fact, I think of myself as a frequent gesturer. Many learners, myself included, demonstrate spontaneous gestures when trying to describe a task or knowledge that they cannot quite articulate. These gestures that we use while speaking are a way of revealing our implicit knowledge. Because gesturing behavior helps us reveal knowledge we cannot articulate, could gesturing enhance our learning? New research on gesturing has shown that gesturing can give us insight to the information that we cannot express through speech. But what happens when we are forced to gesture? Can forced gesturing reveal our implicit knowledge or perhaps, prepare us for learning?
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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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