Sunny's AP Psychology Blog

It's... Memory!

Memory is the base on which we build our sense of self and the source on which we draw to develop conscious thinking skills. Without memory, there is no self. Without memory, one would live in an eternal present, like an animal or a newborn. This article describes some new discoveries on how memory works and how it is intricately involved with the sense of self.
I was rather surprised at the ease of false memory implanting. For someone to create a memory of such a traumatic event as discovering her mother’s dead body out of a simple suggestion seems very fantastic, yet a fourth of people are quite susceptible to such. This was quite interesting provided me with food for thought. The idea that the mistakes involved in memory are vital to improvement and that this ability to make mistakes is vital and precious was a new idea to me, and likewise intrigued me; but it did make much sense. If we replicated memory faithfully all the time, we would be no better than robots, like units mechanically going through life.
The homunculus crisis is the mystery behind all the neural connections and activity behind thought and memory – it is uncertain precisely what is doing the remembering and thinking. What stimulates our thoughts and puts certain neural connections into action? It’s a mystery.
Lynch’s experiment wherein subjects had their sleep disturbed during sleep showed that REM sleep had much to do with our consolidation of memory, thereby supporting the information processing theory of the cognitive school of thought on the purpose of dreams.
When one goes through an experience, it arouses some emotion and floods the brain with hormones which have an effect of imprinting certain events into the mind. This is useful as we need to remember past crisis in order to be able to get through future ones. Sometimes however, these memories become imprinted too severely, and get to the point of intruding into everyday life, impairing a person severely.
There is evidence that amnesia and repression are caused by a malfunctioning hippocampus. The hippocampus processes memories of past events before an individual is able to recall those memories in ‘viewable’ form. However, other parts of the brain may be unconsciously remembering things. We can all recall the general meaning of an event. It’s just the details that are lost and perhaps replaced or made up. So memory is more reconstructive than reproductive.
The new paradigm of memory is one in which memory is seen as a mix of reality and imagined details, which are altered and edited through emotion and later memories. Memory shapes our self, and our self shapes the way we remember things.
Reading this article brought me to realize how truly malleable memory is; it is a vastly complex and decidedly un-mechanic process and has much to do with the very fabric of our identities. It is a most interesting phenomenon with much to be discovered about it.

posted by 미카 @ 9:21 AM