Post by beth on Jan 2, 2015 0:19:05 GMT -5
Over the past few days, I've run into some interesting articles about memory. Here's the first part with the rest on another thread coming up. At the end, I'll add a link to follow and check out the site, if you like.
Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Memory (the first 5)
10. Our Memories Make Up Who We Are
Many people are under the impression that memories are static or at least fairly stable. This is an understandable misconception because for the longest time many researchers in the field of learning and memory were under the same impression. Research in the last decade, especially research by a neuroscientist named Karim Nader, has proved that our memory is not nearly as stable as we once believed. The common wisdom was that once something was consolidated—or encoded into long-term memory—that it couldn’t be altered when recalled again. The belief held by most was that if you did want to alter a memory, you needed to do it early in the encoding process, before consolidation was fully completed.
However, Nader’s research and experiments have since shown that this is not true at all. While he was intrigued by memory from a young age, it was the memories of 9/11 that led him to start thinking about how we can alter our past memories. He refers to these “flashbulb” memories of important events and how many people remembered seeing the first plane hit the World Trade Center on television on September 11, even though that footage was not shown until the next day. It made him wonder if people were recalling memories and then subtly altering them each time.
His research showed that when we recall something there is another level of memorizing as we recall it—a sort of reconsolidation of the memory. In other words, we can subtly alter our memories based on how we want or need to see the world today, and it also helps us put everything in our lives into proper context. This means rather than our current self being based on past memories, we often alter our memories to better mesh with how we think things should be and how we view ourselves.
9. I Just Need To Memorize It
By far, the most common method of learning things in school is still rote memorization. You either write or recite a phrase, a set of mathematical formulas, or what have you over and over until you remember them. For many learners and many teachers this is still the most common way to memorize anything, but it is actually horrendously inefficient and ineffective. Of course, memorizing something by rote can indeed encode it effectively into your permanent memory, but by robbing it of context, it makes recall and proper memorization much more difficult.
Many people will hit exam time and may have memorized what they needed to know, and it truly does exist in their brains’ long-term storage, but they don’t have the proper means to recall it. The reason for this is all about the context. If the student was memorizing by rote and not relating it to other class material or using any memory tricks to improve later recall, they may be unable to find the proper context in which to recall the memory later.
For this reason, there is some controversy in education over teaching people to memorize things versus teaching them to think critically and relate information. Unfortunately, the controversy misses the real point: It’s not necessarily about memorization, but how you remember. If you can remember something based on its relationship with other things in the same class and how they affect each other, you will do much better on recall when the time comes. There are also many mnemonic techniques that can be used to create context clues for better memory recall.
8, It Will Come Back To Me
If you’ve ever had a really great idea or thought of something important and then immediately forgotten it, you might have struggled for a while and then said “it will come back to me later” and moved on for awhile. Unfortunately, much of the time that memory is simply never coming back. The misconception here lies in how memory works. For anything to end up in long-term memory, it has to go through an encoding process first, and this takes time. The longer the process, and the more effort and context goes into it, the stronger the memory. What this means is that if you just now learned something, or thought of it for the first time, then your mind is going to need some time—and effort on your part—to actually encode that memory into long-term storage.
If the memory you expect will come back to you is something that you have thought of before—it was already in your long-term memory—then it probably will come back to you eventually, with the caveat that if you don’t know the context clues, it might appear again at a random time that doesn’t make any sense when it is inconvenient for you to recode the context in which you remember it. If the thought you hope will come back to you is truly new and you almost immediately forget, the unfortunate truth is that it is probably never going to return. The memory is likely lost forever because it never was actually a memory.
7. The Validity Of Eyewitness Testimony
In recent years, psychologists have cautioned courts and jurors to start taking eyewitness testimony with about 1,000 grains of salt. The reason for this is because, as a general rule, eyewitness testimony cannot be relied on as a sole valid way to decide guilt. For example, the Innocence Project, a group that uses DNA testing to help exonerate people who are wrongly convicted of murders, has been tracking how wrongful convictions end up happening in the first place. In well over 200 cases of people who were falsely convicted, nearly three-quarters of the people ended up in jail due to faulty eyewitness testimony. If that wasn’t bad enough, a good portion of these cases actually involved multiple eyewitness accounts.
As we mentioned earlier, it doesn’t take much for us to alter our past memories, and it doesn’t take much for an eyewitness to do so either. While their initial recall could be correct, given time between the events and questions by police or prosecutors, it’s very easy for people to end up with an honest but completely warped version of the events that actually happened. This can sometimes cause things to become very muddled in a court of law.
In the 2014 grand jury that convened to discuss whether Darren Wilson should be indicted, there were a multitude of witnesses, and no one really had the exact same story as the others. Because of how we alter our memories based on our own perceptions, we can end up with dozens of witnesses who all are absolutely convinced that they saw something different happen. This makes eyewitness testimony fairly suspect, and for this reason it is often relied on less and less in court.
6. Remembering Dreams
Dreams are something that science is still struggling to fully understand. In fact, one thing that scientists cannot really agree on to this day is why we dream. There are many theories on the subject, but not a single one is conclusively proven or accepted by the scientific community. As you might imagine, since we still lack a lot of knowledge about dreams, it stands to reason that we are still trying to understand why we sometimes recall our dreams and why we often do not. While some people are under the impression that they remember dreams better if they are in a really deep sleep, it turns out the opposite is true.
Researchers were interested in the fact that some people tend to recall a lot of dreams and others hardly ever do. What they found was that people who tend to recall dreams a lot have higher blood flow in certain parts of the brain associated with increased mental activity while they are snoozing.
It turns out that the brain cannot actually encode new information into long-term storage while you are fully asleep. What they believe is that those who are regular dreamers are actually waking up momentarily without realizing it—due to stimuli around them—which allows their now somewhat awake brain to encode parts of the dream into long-term storage. This would explain why even those who recall dreams often only remember brief and sometimes vague snatches as your brain only has a few moments of wakefulness to turn the memory into something permanent.
Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Memory (the first 5)
10. Our Memories Make Up Who We Are
Many people are under the impression that memories are static or at least fairly stable. This is an understandable misconception because for the longest time many researchers in the field of learning and memory were under the same impression. Research in the last decade, especially research by a neuroscientist named Karim Nader, has proved that our memory is not nearly as stable as we once believed. The common wisdom was that once something was consolidated—or encoded into long-term memory—that it couldn’t be altered when recalled again. The belief held by most was that if you did want to alter a memory, you needed to do it early in the encoding process, before consolidation was fully completed.
However, Nader’s research and experiments have since shown that this is not true at all. While he was intrigued by memory from a young age, it was the memories of 9/11 that led him to start thinking about how we can alter our past memories. He refers to these “flashbulb” memories of important events and how many people remembered seeing the first plane hit the World Trade Center on television on September 11, even though that footage was not shown until the next day. It made him wonder if people were recalling memories and then subtly altering them each time.
His research showed that when we recall something there is another level of memorizing as we recall it—a sort of reconsolidation of the memory. In other words, we can subtly alter our memories based on how we want or need to see the world today, and it also helps us put everything in our lives into proper context. This means rather than our current self being based on past memories, we often alter our memories to better mesh with how we think things should be and how we view ourselves.
9. I Just Need To Memorize It
By far, the most common method of learning things in school is still rote memorization. You either write or recite a phrase, a set of mathematical formulas, or what have you over and over until you remember them. For many learners and many teachers this is still the most common way to memorize anything, but it is actually horrendously inefficient and ineffective. Of course, memorizing something by rote can indeed encode it effectively into your permanent memory, but by robbing it of context, it makes recall and proper memorization much more difficult.
Many people will hit exam time and may have memorized what they needed to know, and it truly does exist in their brains’ long-term storage, but they don’t have the proper means to recall it. The reason for this is all about the context. If the student was memorizing by rote and not relating it to other class material or using any memory tricks to improve later recall, they may be unable to find the proper context in which to recall the memory later.
For this reason, there is some controversy in education over teaching people to memorize things versus teaching them to think critically and relate information. Unfortunately, the controversy misses the real point: It’s not necessarily about memorization, but how you remember. If you can remember something based on its relationship with other things in the same class and how they affect each other, you will do much better on recall when the time comes. There are also many mnemonic techniques that can be used to create context clues for better memory recall.
8, It Will Come Back To Me
If you’ve ever had a really great idea or thought of something important and then immediately forgotten it, you might have struggled for a while and then said “it will come back to me later” and moved on for awhile. Unfortunately, much of the time that memory is simply never coming back. The misconception here lies in how memory works. For anything to end up in long-term memory, it has to go through an encoding process first, and this takes time. The longer the process, and the more effort and context goes into it, the stronger the memory. What this means is that if you just now learned something, or thought of it for the first time, then your mind is going to need some time—and effort on your part—to actually encode that memory into long-term storage.
If the memory you expect will come back to you is something that you have thought of before—it was already in your long-term memory—then it probably will come back to you eventually, with the caveat that if you don’t know the context clues, it might appear again at a random time that doesn’t make any sense when it is inconvenient for you to recode the context in which you remember it. If the thought you hope will come back to you is truly new and you almost immediately forget, the unfortunate truth is that it is probably never going to return. The memory is likely lost forever because it never was actually a memory.
7. The Validity Of Eyewitness Testimony
In recent years, psychologists have cautioned courts and jurors to start taking eyewitness testimony with about 1,000 grains of salt. The reason for this is because, as a general rule, eyewitness testimony cannot be relied on as a sole valid way to decide guilt. For example, the Innocence Project, a group that uses DNA testing to help exonerate people who are wrongly convicted of murders, has been tracking how wrongful convictions end up happening in the first place. In well over 200 cases of people who were falsely convicted, nearly three-quarters of the people ended up in jail due to faulty eyewitness testimony. If that wasn’t bad enough, a good portion of these cases actually involved multiple eyewitness accounts.
As we mentioned earlier, it doesn’t take much for us to alter our past memories, and it doesn’t take much for an eyewitness to do so either. While their initial recall could be correct, given time between the events and questions by police or prosecutors, it’s very easy for people to end up with an honest but completely warped version of the events that actually happened. This can sometimes cause things to become very muddled in a court of law.
In the 2014 grand jury that convened to discuss whether Darren Wilson should be indicted, there were a multitude of witnesses, and no one really had the exact same story as the others. Because of how we alter our memories based on our own perceptions, we can end up with dozens of witnesses who all are absolutely convinced that they saw something different happen. This makes eyewitness testimony fairly suspect, and for this reason it is often relied on less and less in court.
6. Remembering Dreams
Dreams are something that science is still struggling to fully understand. In fact, one thing that scientists cannot really agree on to this day is why we dream. There are many theories on the subject, but not a single one is conclusively proven or accepted by the scientific community. As you might imagine, since we still lack a lot of knowledge about dreams, it stands to reason that we are still trying to understand why we sometimes recall our dreams and why we often do not. While some people are under the impression that they remember dreams better if they are in a really deep sleep, it turns out the opposite is true.
Researchers were interested in the fact that some people tend to recall a lot of dreams and others hardly ever do. What they found was that people who tend to recall dreams a lot have higher blood flow in certain parts of the brain associated with increased mental activity while they are snoozing.
It turns out that the brain cannot actually encode new information into long-term storage while you are fully asleep. What they believe is that those who are regular dreamers are actually waking up momentarily without realizing it—due to stimuli around them—which allows their now somewhat awake brain to encode parts of the dream into long-term storage. This would explain why even those who recall dreams often only remember brief and sometimes vague snatches as your brain only has a few moments of wakefulness to turn the memory into something permanent.