Memories

27 Jun 1996 22:58

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Memories can't wait

"Mnemotechnics," i.e. techniques for improving your memory, such as the medieval "memory palace," where you associated the things you wanted to remember with locations in an imaginary building. (Cf. homepages.) Doubtless there were others --- after all, people memorized Homer!

People's recollections can be altered by the way you phrase questions about the past. In one experiment, people were shown a videotape of a car hitting a stop sign. Those who were asked how fast was the car going when it "smashed" into the sign estimated significantly higher speeds than those asked how fast it was going when it "hit" the sign. Recollections of colors, etc., can also be altered by phrasing questions appropriately. (From my lecture notes to Cognitive Science 1.) In a similar vein, consider the by-now-notorious fabulations passing for "hypnotically recovered memories". (I forget who it was that pointed out that hypnotists who believe in reincarnation never get the UFO abductees or Satanically abused, and vice versa.) Clearly episodic memories are often "reconstructions"; what about other sorts of memories? What is the neurology behind such a (apparently maladaptive) feature of the mind?

See also: Cognitive Science; The "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s and Recovered Memories

Recommended:
• Albert Lord, Singer of Tales [How oral epic poetry works. Singers do not actually memorize a fixed text, but learn conventions, cliches, formulas and general tricks, which allow them to spin out the basic story, in verse, in real time, with each performance. (Admittedly, some of the tricks, e.g. "catalogs," are ways of keeping the audience occupied while the singer thinks up the next patch of verse, so it's not quite real time.) This material is fascinating in its own right, and there seem to be intruiging connections with popular culture.]
• Daniel L. Schacter, Kenneth A. Norman, and Wilma Koutstaal, "The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory", Annual Review of Psychology 49 (1998): 289--318 [Review of the clinical and experimental evidence establishing the constructive nature of many kinds of memory. Horribly writeen but quite impeccable.]
• Tim Shallice, From Neuropsychology to Mental Structure
• Tim Shallice and Richard P. Cooper, The Organisation of Mind

To read:
• William Bechtel, "The Compatability of Complex Systems and Reduction: A Case Analysis of Memory Research", Minds and Machines 11 (2001): 483--502
• Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch (eds.), Memory in Mind and Culture
• Peter Carruthers, The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us About the Nature of Human Thought
• Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond J. Dolan and Yadin Dudai, "Following the Crowd: Brain Substrates of Long-Term Memory Conformity", Science 333 (2011): 108--111
• Howard Eichenbaum, "Declarative Memory: Insights from Cognitive Neurobiology," Annual Review of Psychology, 48 (1997): 547--572
• Howard Eichenbaum and Neal J. Cohen, From Conditioning to Conscious Recollection: Memory Systems of the Brain
• J. D. E. Gabrieli , "Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Memory,"Annual Review of Psychology, 49 (1998): 87--115
• John Kotre, White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory [and what a dubious creation it is]
• Longnian Lin, Remus Osan, Shy Shoham, Wenjun Jin, Wenqi Zuo, and Joe Z. Tsien, "Identification of network-level coding units for real-time representation of episodic experiences in the hippocampus", PNAS 102 (2005): 6125--6130
• Elizabeth Loftus
  • Eyewitness Testimony
  • Myth of Repressed Memory
  • Witness for the defense
• Yasushi Miyashita, "Cognitive Memory: Cellular and Network Machineries and Their Top-Down Control", Science 306 (2004): 435--440
• Mark R. Rosenzweig, "Aspects of the Search for Neural Mechanisms of Memory" Annual Review of Psychology, 47 (1996): 1--32
• Bjorn H. Schott, Richard H. Henson, Alan Richardson-Klavehn, Christine Becker, Volker Thoma, Hans-Jochen Heinze and Emrah Duzel, "Redefining implicit and explicit memory: The functional neuroanatomy of priming, remebering, and control of retrieval", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (2005): 1257--1262
• Singer and Salovey, The Remembered Self
• Oliver Wilhelm, Andrea Hildebrandt and Klaus Oberauer, "What is working memory capacity, and how can we measure it?", Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013): 433--453
• Tom J. Wills, Colin Lever, Francesca Cacucci, Neil Burgess and John O'Keefe, "Attractor Dynamics in the Hippocampal Representation of the Local Environment", Science 308 (2005): 873--876
• Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder