I thought that the most interesting part of the reading was the different aspects of memory that Schacter identified in his book. My memory seems like a jumbled unorganized mass of events and emotions that I can never recall at the right times, but always comes back to me at the wrong times. I found the ideas of field and observer memories very interesting as well as remembering and knowing memories. While reading these concepts and thinking about my own memories I was able to better organize and understand some memories of mine. I have a very hard time remembering events from my childhood, and one problem that I have always noticed is that when trying to remember things, I always end up remembering what I initially think of as memories. After thinking about it further, I realize that I am really remembering photos taken of me as a child, adding a story to them, and then thinking that they are memories.

I also found the discussion of computers as rememberers very interesting. I do not know much about computers but I disagree with the cognitive scientists who think that computers could be programmed to undergo the same processes as human memory. They may be able to recall events, but they will be missing the emotional and sensorial aspects of the memory. For me sometimes the strongest and most powerful memories are those brought on suddenly by a smell or sound that I have not experienced in a long time.

September 19th Blog

I was also very interested in the comparions made between the human memory and computers. I would agree that emotion and feeling are what separate the two. Some people remember events purely by what was going on emotionaly. This is something computers will never accomplish.

The 'whys' of many of the issues with memory are what I went over the most. Bourtchouladze's recount of Ebbinghaus' curve of forgetting caught my attention. I'm sure the question of why we remember the things we do, will arise often. However, I would tend to disagree that the good memories are what stand out. The majority of my childhood memories are traumatic events. It tends to be the memories of overwhelming moments that last, and those tend to be the painful. When we fell down the stairs and had to get stitches, or broke a bone, etc. I can't count the times I've sat around with friends telling "horror" stories from our childhoods, where this scar came from, or how badly we had the chicken pox. But maybe that's just me?

Blog for 9/19/07

Something I found very interesting in the beginning of Memories Are Made of This was the story with Theuth and Thamos. The whole point of the story is that writing "is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence"(pg. 2 Bourtchouladze). And later on goes on to talk about Socrates and how how he basically says writing weakens the mind. I thought about this and at first I thought this wasn't true at all and very extreme. But, the more I thought about it the more I realized we've become dependent on writing and the individual memory is not crucial to our society anymore.

finally getting my post in [Sept 19th]

note: sorry my post is so late. i did not notice the email about it on sunday, and tried to get on to the blog via the website. Then yesterday i saw the email but it would not let me log on - kept on telling me that my password was wrong [i put it in like 15 times, changed my password, copy pasted the code... nothing worked]. Then after that, right before i fell asleep i tried again and this time used my personal email address [which is on gmail] and it worked, but i was way too tired to submit a post [but now i will]. As a funny side note, i started to doubt my memory when it kept on telling me my password was wrong =P

POST for Sept 19

One of the themes that came to me in the reading is that we [mankind] seem to know very little about memory and how it functions. Personally, i am not especially disturbed by the lack of knowledge in this particular area, however, after reading Neisser's speech on the failings of memory research, i thought about why it is we don't know more. Neisser argues that the biggest hurdle is that scientist are not willing to study what is interesting in the field of memory research, and he brings up certain examples as well as his own significant bias. What seems to be the overarching problem with Neisser's argument is that he faults neuro-psychologists and neuro-biologists for not being social psychologists. He seems deeply interested in the study of people for who they are [like the ability of a lawyer to remember previous court cases], as opposed to the study of people for their biological and more general characteristics. He does mention of course that a general study of memory has proven inadequate in explaining the phenomenon of memory, but i do not find that he makes a compelling arugement for a better method. In fact it seems to me that he spends time talking about how it would so 'interesting' to research how people are able to perform "literal recall" of things like the bible or of pages of prose that they enjoy. While i would also be very interested in reading a report on that kind of research, i don't understand how it is supposed to explain the mystery of memory to us. It seems to me that what it will do is provide us with phenomenon, something that we can point to and say "that is true", or "this is what happens", but we will not be able to say "people can memorize it because...", or "this is possible thanks to the interaction between ....". Or in other words, our understanding will not necessarily increase. From my limited education on specific memory research, it sounds as though we [scientist everywhere] are simply stumped. Neisser's point of social-psych research being the holy grail for memory research seems like a big reach to me, although as i said before, i would love to read the results on said studies, and we may just get lucky and score some kind of amazing correlation.
My question to pose to the class would be: how much of the general memory research results were obvious to you [the results that the 3rd graders knew], and do you think that if you spent time seriously pondering about it [without large scale experiments] you could gleam more knowledge on the subject? Would there be a limit or an endpoint to what you could gleam?

Thought Piece, Week 1

Tasnim Azad
Thought Piece on Reading Assignments for 9/19

Regarding his speech at the “Practical Aspects of Memory” conference, Neisser’s intention is to inspire his contemporaries to reconsider already asked questions in new directions, but I feel that changes in the way memory is studied were already in motion. The fact that Neisser gave this speech at such a conference makes a prediction about the amount of energy that would be spent on the field in the coming years. But still, I agree with Bourtchouladze in his comment that despite tremendous advances in studying the enigma that is memory, we are in some ways still as lost as the ancient Greeks. After reading these two works first, I was relieved to receive some clarification and uncover more interesting questions in Schacter’s Searching for Memory.

Schacter’s introduction and opening chapters struck me because they made points that were obvious, but I had never considered them of great importance. Of course, we utilize memory constantly. How else would we be able to recall our own names or the hundreds of names and faces stored in our brains? Or remember how to turn on a computer and access a variety of programs and files without pause? By acknowledging some simple truths about how memory is used, I believe we can more easily move forward with important questions. I also appreciated the exercises Schacter suggests to readers in order to test our own memories and realize its limits and potential.

Some questions that I had in mind while reading were in regard to the specific cases Schacter describes. I have read works of fiction and seen episodes of Law and Order: SVU where a victim of sexual abuse will discover repressed memories deep in his or her mind when interrogated the right way or when facing a similar event. For whatever reason, I never doubted that this was possible. Can some part of our subconscious really take control and block out memories too painful for our minds to handle? Why is it a common idea that we tend to remember the good memories rather than the negative when we think back to a period of time, such as high school or past relationships? Could this repression of certain traumatic memories be similar to the way our bodies physically heal wounds? In addition, the story of the Italian man known as GR has left me to wonder if such cases could have a standard treatment. Could any physically taxing experience reignite damaged regions of our brains? Finally, when discussing people who have committed greats works of considerable length to memory, such as the Koran or Shakespeare’s sonnets, what role, if any, do patterns and the mathematical significance of these works have in mastering them?

(Sorry for the late post; while checking for responses, I realized I hadn't posted it properly the first time around.)

Blog #1

Both Schacter and James devote a great deal of time to examining the importance of placing oneself in a memory in order for it to be fully and accurately recalled.

The more we associate all those random things we’re supposed to remember with facts or places that are important to us, the more likely we are to remember them. As Bourtchouladze points out, the ancient Greeks and Romans, out of necessity, had these tactics down to a science. Chapter two in Schacter’s book focuses on this idea. He discusses different techniques for remembering everything from strings of numbers or lists of words to events from our daily lives. Over and over, the theme of associating the new information with things that we already know and remember comes up. His explanation of the Museum Test particularly resonated with me and it was so fascinating to see what people with different connections to art and art history remembered about the painting.

I share Neisser’s frustration with the extent to which psychology has ignored the more practical and natural questions of memory. Why is it that I can remember all the lyrics to full length musicals but had a terrible time remembering what quotation came from which book during my high school English exam? On the other hand, these topics, upon further reflection, seem so multi-faceted and complex that one would hardly know where to begin investigating them. Perhaps exploration of the neuroscience of memory systems is a good way to get a handle on these difficult questions. If we know how a memory is stored, then we can begin to ask why it is remembered and how it is forgotten. Having said this, the amount of information and the accuracy of the information in James’ article, written in 1890, suggests that modern research has done little more than confirm and elaborate on what has been known for a while. We know more about the anatomy of the brain now than we did in 1890 but it does seem that modern psychologists have done little to significantly advance our understanding of how memory works.

I would disagree that computers will ever be able to think or interpret to the depth the humans are able to. Computers may have a larger memory capacity but I feel like personality and emotion have a great deal to do with what we remember and why we remember certain things. There’s no code for emotion and computers can’t always interpret context, to figure out what’s important and what’s not. AI can do a lot but I don’t believe that it will ever be able to associate emotion with all the information it is capable of “remembering”. I would cite Schacter’s museum test as an example. Yes, a computer that had “seen” the painting would be able to recall what it looked like far more accurately than most humans, but would it be able to describe any emotions that the painting evoked? Would a computer be able to interpret the painting like subject #3 did?

Some questions. How do we go about exploring the more basic questions of memory? Are the capacities to feel emotion and interpret context necessary for understanding memories?

Blog Thought Piece #1
For September 19, 2007’s class
By Annie James

My prominent broad ascertainment of this particular essay of James’ is that one of the aspects of the concept of memory that essentially renders it a “phenomenon” is the fact that, though memory is more or less the absolute most important component of our abilities to live and function as human beings in every conceivable worldly context (“…just about everything we do or say depends on the smooth and efficient operation of our memory systems.” [Schacter, p. 2]), there is an extremely significant amount of aspects of it over which we seem to have literally no control. And this lack of control can manifest itself in a variety (and a contrasting one, at that) of ways. A very intuitive and almost superficial way of conceptualizing what memories are consists of thinking of them as things that must be consciously “created”, so to speak; we memorize facts and materials for a test, or directions to a certain place, or lines for a play. But as can be clearly derived from each piece of this week’s reading, and of course from the general knowledge of memory as a whole, this type of memory constitutes an extremely small portion of the entirety of the human memory system. Most of the things we remember are not only not created in this way, but are created with no conscious effort whatsoever. This fact holds true on the other hand as well, in terms of forgetting; we can hold thoughts, ideas and concepts in our working memory in the in the most efficient ways for just the amount of time that we need them to perform a given task, and then completely forget them for the rest of our lives because we have nothing concrete and/or personal to use as an “association” (discussed at length by James throughout the essay) by which to retrieve that memory. The outcome of the task facilitated by that working memory process is literally the only evidence that the thoughts, ideas or concepts contributing to it even happened at all.

James discusses the idea of a person being able to remember an event to which they paid no conscious attention by using the example of someone being aware of the fact that another person in his field of sight has changed his/her location in a room whilst the first person was only paying conscious attention to the assigned task of counting the lines of text on a piece of paper. (Paragraph 7, section 2, quoted from Exner) This memory, though seemingly inconsequential, is one of the key aspects behind memory rendering itself a phenomenon because no conscious or even explicable effort was made to hold that memory. Further along in James’ essay, he discusses the condition of aphasia – the inexplicable loss of word memory and ability to express oneself through speech. (Paragraph 15, section 8) Once someone is fluent, per se, in any language, it is the general and logically assumed result of this that the speaker does not have to make a conscious effort to remember the applicable grammar, vocabulary, etc. to form sentences and communicate with others. It is actually most disconcerting that the loss of this virtually essential functional ability is, in the condition of aphasia and related others, completely outside of our control, especially in the sense that, in general, the things that we do in fact make a conscious effort to remember are of radically less importance than those that we don’t; would you rather forget the route to your best friend’s house or forget how to have a conversation with your best friend (or everyone, for that matter)?

On the same note, and lending itself more to comparative discussion, is James’ discussion of the extremely complex process by which anything must officially enter the “memory proper”. He gives the example of a person seeing Mevius in first a temple and then in Titus’ house, and goes on to explain that although the person is perceiving Mevius in their working memory as being in Titus’ house (the current location), he/she actually recognizes Mevius by recalling the memory of the first time that he/she met Mevius – in the aforementioned temple. (Paragraph 8, section 3, quoted from Wolff) This is a perfect example of the phenomenal “double effect” of memory, in that even though a person is appropriately perceiving a given person in the present context, he/she is using the context of an episodic memory of a completely different time and place, with the only associative similarity being the presence of the other person, to identify the person and recall the information necessary to interact with that person. From this we can look more deeply into Schacter’s discussion of the distinction between episodic and semantic memory (p. 17). It is clear and logical that there is a distinction between the way that we remember facts about a certain place or person (semantic) and the way that we remember the first time we ever met that person (episodic), but then the question is: When does an episodic memory essentially become, or at least lend parts of itself to create, a semantic memory?

For if we contemplate our knowledge of memory, this transition is almost always, if not always, absolutely necessary in the formation of a semantic memory; it is likely that a person will not remember the very first time he/she was taught the alphabet or how to do arithmetic, but that particular episodic memory, even if it does not exist presently, certainly existed once, because it was obviously the initial foundation on which that person began to learn those basic skills. Even in the case that something that would be an episodic memory becomes, due to an insufficient duration of the time during which the episode was experienced, nothing but experiencing a “state of mind which is shut up to its own moment” (paragraph 2, section 2) and that never actually enters the memory proper, such as feeling “acute and intense” (paragraph 3, section 2, quoted from Richet) pain for no more than a hundredth of a second, we cannot ever say for certain whether or not that state of mind simply left our memory completely and forever, or whether it is retained, entirely dormant, in some part of the physical nerve-tissue and will go on to “at its own moment determine the transition of our thinking in a vital way, and decide our action irrevocably.” (Paragraph 4, section 2) And if this were the case, we would of course have no knowledge of it. So, is it repetition of and/or continuous training in or conscious exposure to something that facilitates an episodic memory becoming, or becoming a component of, a semantic memory? Possibly. But have we not just seen that even the smallest, shortest, most transient states of consciousness have the potential to directly affect a part of the memory that is consciously and vividly retained?

Let’s say for argument's sake that one of the first times that a child took a test in multiplication, the one mistake that he/she made was forgetting to write the respective “zeros” when multiplying the first number by the digits in tens, hundreds, thousands (and so on) places of the second number. This mistake would have of course resulted in him/her getting the answer wrong, and he/she would then presumably receive an explanation from his/her teacher of why it was a wrong answer and how to obtain a correct one in the future. Even though the moment of disappointment the mental correction of a minor procedural fallacy would probably not be remembered explicitly, if at all, by the child in the future, it is very likely that, each time that the child did handwritten multiplication in the future, he/she would make an extra effort, even if an unconscious one, to check for that mistake that he/she made the first time around. He/she would also be able to tell you “offhand”, so to speak, that that is a necessary step in multiplication. From this we see that both semantic and procedural memory can be affected by nothing more than a fleeting instant. So what exactly is involved in that transition period? And why, when it involves something on which we put so much conscious effort to remember, is the process by which the brain forms that memory almost completely out of our control?

A couple questions for class, since my response to just those two sources was pretty lengthy…

1. Do you think that people actually had better memories in the ancient times when events and ideas were never, or rarely, documented in writing and only stored, by various and elaborate mechanisms, in the brain itself? If so, do you think the changing environment and culture over that time span or the passing-on psychological genetics (“nurture or nature”) is a more prominent factor in it? (Bourtchouladze)

2. Do you think that emotion has enough of an impact on human memory to render the results of experiments with animal memory systems unable to be logically applied to our knowledge of the human memory, even though certain physical similarities have been identified? (Neisser)

Thought piece 9-16-07 --or, I finally figured out this blog thing!

William James has written a huge chapter that seems to have been quite a comprehensive study of memory research up to the time of his writing it, and he puts together a pretty clear framework through which to view memory. He first discusses primary memory, which is a sort of short-term memory of something we have just experienced, and it has not yet left our consciousness. James, with his term primary memory, seems to be describing the human experience of the present—the eternally transient moment of perception, the “eternal now,” the collection of just-passed experiences still held in consciousness. The things we are aware of in our primary memory make up our current conception of the immediate present.

After something leaves our primary memory, it must be recalled by our secondary memory to be experienced again; and according to James, “substantive... states of mind” are far more likely to be able to be recalled. That is, those states of mind attended to for longer periods of time, in which the rememberer thinks more about his experiences and associates with it more already-retained memories and schemata, will be easier to be remembered. James, very interestingly introduces the idea of consciousness into the process of remembering: if an event is to be truly remembered, the rememberer must wholeheartedly believe that this event happened to him, to his self, in his own past. Schacter's very human approach to discussing memory latches on firmly to this conscious and active placement of one's self (or one's past self, depending on one's metaphysical beliefs) in the past situation from which the memory was made. I have some personal reservations about jumping onto the bandwagon of saying true memories must necessarily contain an element of conscious recollection; but I will decline to further comment until I understand further theories connected to implicit memory. I also wish to much explore sorts of seemingly unconscious muscle memory—“just like riding a bike!”

James also spends a good deal of time on forgetting, much more than some of the other authors we've read for today who mention it. I like his idea of selection and how an overload of memories—such as the ability to remember everything all the time—would be just as difficult to deal with as remembering nothing at all. This phenomenon, I believe, is mirrored in the way we perceive exterior stimuli, as Aldous Huxley explores in his “The Doors of Perception.” Evolutionarily, we have had to train ourselves to select the most important things to perceive and to remember.

Neisser spoke about this phenomenon, “the superiority of meaningful material,” in his damning article, calling it an easy empirical generalization, which is obvious to most kindergarteners. He goes through many of James' findings and dismisses them in this way. He accuses most memory research of having too little to do with “what happens in the real world.” I noticed this Lab vs. Life problem in most of the studies cited in this weeks readings and was very happy when Neisser pointed out this glaring catch. I assume much of our semester in this class will be focused on finding ways around the problem of gathering reliable data that pertains to our everyday lives. He poses many questions which will keep us plenty busy until Christmas.

I feel that Schacter begins to deal with some of these in creative ways. Both on the page before the table of contents and on the second page of the introduction, we find the quote, “Memory is life.” His first two chapters are filled with memory's connection to the sense of self, personal identity, and self-empowering notions such as “mental time travel.” While laying his framework through which to discuss memory, he uses works of art, I believe, to try to bridge the gap between scientific data and quotidian experience. If nothing else, his discussions of art can be useful, like a metaphor or simile, to help create another image or association, or another perspective to access the data and theories he brings to the table.

I'd also like to say that I side with those cognitive scientists who believe that computers have the potential to mimic human minds and memories. We simply don't have enough information about human behavior; and the computer that can do this may very well take up the space of several continents. But we're working on mapping the human genome, so how can one say it's impossible to map out human memory patterns. And let's face it, that Ridley Scott film is really convincing!

So: How well do Schactel and Bourtchouladze do at answering Neisser's questions? Do we really have no more to say about memory than the ancient Greeks? Does James' framework hold up against modern memory research findings? How can we find worthwhile research results that pertain to our everyday lives?

I can't access any links on the class website...

...except for the "Syllabus" one... They just don't work...

Are they working for anyone else?

We have reading on there, don't we?