WSC 2018: Science of Memory

Introductory Questions

● How do we store and retrieve memories?

○ MEMORY STORAGE
■ What we know: stored in the brain
● May be primed to fire together in the same pattern that created the
original experience; each memory is stored in the region that initiated it
● May even be encoded redundantly in various parts of the cortex
○ Therefore even if one recollection is wiped out, there are
duplicates, or alternative pathways, elsewhere, through which the
memory may still be retrieved
○ RETRIEVAL OF MEMORY
■ “the subsequent re-accessing of events or information from the past;” brain
replays the pattern of neural activity that was generating in response to that
particular event
■ Recall Paradigms: After giving a list of items one uses a
● Free recall: listed in any order
● Cued recall: tested through cues or guides
● Serial recall: list events in the order they occurred
● What is the evolutionary value of memory? Does answering this question suggest anything about
what memories we might be most likely to hold onto?
○ Is adaptive
■ Helped solve problems related to survival and passage of genes
● An organism with the capacity to remember the location of food, or
potential predators, is more likely to survive than an organism without
■ No memory → mistakes → death
● Accidentally break laws or injure oneself by accident
○ We tend to remember the negative events more than the positive
ones
○ Allow people to pass on knowledge
■ Remember something and tell other people (or future generations)
● Passing on of history, etc
○ BRAIN EVOLUTION → identification of seven representational systems in the human
brain (evolution of human memory)
■ Reinforcement-learning systems
■ Navigation system
■ Biased-competition systems
■ Feature system
■ Goal system
■ Social-subjective system
● What makes certain memories “stick” more than others
 ○ How special it is
■ "Those peculiar experiences are the things that stand out, that make a more
lasting memory."
● Notion of peculiarity that helps us understand and makes lasting
memories
○ Emotional VS Physical
■ E.g. Painful emotional experiences are remembered more than those of physical
pain
○ Significance/Impact
■ Complex problem/mere issue → short-term memory
■ Dangerous situations → long-term memory
● So that we can avoid the dangerous situations in the future
○ OTHER FACTORS
■ Mood (e.g. happy > sad) , priming, blanking out
● How do our memories and experiences shape who we are?
○ Modifies our values
■ Ideas we form in our childhood and early teens forms the core beliefs
● Strongest factor that influences our personality
○ Reactions and responses
■ Experience leaves a permanent code of response to similar future experiences in
your memory
● Are likely to respond similarly when you encounter a similar experience
○ Memories can be kept for a long time and we may react to them different
■ Negative experience
● Remember that it was painful
○ Refer back to old memories as guideline of how not to act in
order to avoid the negative feeling again
■ Positive experience
● Want to feel again
○ Try to recreate the experience
■ Perspective of the situation changes along with how we act
● Memories influences our views of the surroundings
○ NOTE: THINGS THAT ARE SHAPED BY EXPERIENCES
■ Thought process
■ Mind set
■ Attitude
■ Aspirations
■ Expectations
■ Social behaviors
● How does memory relate to attachment—such as to other people, or even to inanimate objects,
such as stuffed alpacas?
○ Created when people who interact have connections/relationships
■ Attachment = interactions people have
 ● Attachment connections = people’s perception of others
● Are our memories always reliable? If not, when can they become unreliable?
○ No, they aren’t
■ Memories of occurrences can act as inferences
■ Mind may make up false information to answer questions
■ Misinformation given to a person after an incident
■ Emotion affects the vividness of memory
● People suppress bad memories → become unreliable
● Can our memories lead to distortions of judgment?
○ Memory is affected by
■ Setting
■ Incident
■ Perception
● May lead to distortions in judgements
○ MISINFORMATION EFFECT
■ Mistakes in memory because of new information that affects the memory
● People may remember information that never happened
○ SOURCE MONITORING
■ Correctly recognizing the source of a memory
● Errors may occur while recognizing
● Can we influence the way people remember us?
○ ACTIONS
■ Doing things that can be remembered well
● Making an impact
■ Listening skills
● People want to be heard
■ Understanding people
● What they want/need
■ Developing trust
● Let people know you better
● Even without the help of technology, can we choose to edit our own memories – if so, how?
○ People are defined by their memories
■ Learn from their memories
○ POSSIBLE METHODS
■ Human tendency to be biased
● Perspectives change as we grow and mature
■ Using drugs/medicine to lessen the negativity of bad memories
■ Recreate more pleasing memories that overtake the bad memories
● How reliable is your memory? What steps can you take to make it more reliable?
○ NOT VERY RELIABLE: AFFECTED BY EMOTION
■ Some events may be remembered more strongly than others
● People suppress negative memories
■ Human tendency to be biased
 ● Perspectives can be different
■ Retelling
● Can be changed by someone else
○ HOW TO INCREASE RELIABILITY
■ Get more perspective
● Ask for confirmation/someone’s opinion
■ Recollecting memories frequently
● **Can also result in change though
■ Meditation to calm the brain from working as actively
● Sleeping to strengthen memories

Understanding Memory

● The Basics of Memory

○ What are the biological processes behind memory storage and retrieval?
■ MEMORY STORAGE
● Done in the hippocampus by neurons (organized into a unique network)
○ Specific neurons firing will produce specific outputs and allow
memory to be formed
■ NOTE: Neurons are incapable of storing information, it
is the network of neuron connection that stores memory.
○ Value of neurons are relational and contextual
■ Neuron can be connected to several neural networks at
the same time and its value depends on the networks it’s
connected to
● Memory can be strengthened through reviewing over and over again
○ Strengthens the response of that neural network
■ Allow stronger and new connections to be formed
between neurons
■ MEMORY RETRIEVAL
● Utilizes the same network
○ Stimulus fits the necessary network pattern for that particular
memory
■ Organizing information can help aid retrieval
● In sequences (e.g. such alphabetically, by size or
by time)
● Short term memory → stored and retrieved sequentially
● Long term memory → stored and retrieved by association
● Eg. A test question asks you what color is the sky. The words color and
sky are stimulus for the neuronal network that store the answer. and the
network fires, bringing the answer to bear.
○ What types of memory are there?
 ■
○ How do memories affect the way we view the world?
■ Affect our perception
● Creates bias as we draw information from our memory to assess what we
see or feel
○ Is like looking through a colored glass
● Daniel Kahneman, nobel prize winner, points out that we base our
decisions on memories instead of experience
○ Experiences we remember are defined by change
■ Stories are made up of experiences that are new, novel
and those that have greater significance
■ “We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of
experiences. And even when we think about the future, we don't think of our
future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.”
● E.g. Our religion, culture, background makeup a bulk of our memory
where will draw information from when we are encountered with a
situation
○ Why is memory considered an active reconstructive process?
■ Brains “reconstruct” and string certain images, sounds, etc. into a logical order,
creating a “memory”
● Our brains fill in gaps and create a rational explanation for events
○ Explains why different people remember the same story
differently
● Done using schemas (e.g. war of ghosts [refer below])
■ E.g. today, if you try to recall an instance where you went shopping with your
friend, you will most likely picture yourself walking around the mall with your
friend (in a third person perspective)
● If memory is not reconstructive, you will only recall seeing your friend
walking beside you and not yourself because you are viewing from a first
person perspective
● The Biology of Memory
○ Hippocampus
■ DESCRIPTION
● Has a unique shape, similar to that of a horseshoe
○ Located under the cerebral cortex and in the medial temporal
lobe

● Mammals (ex: humans) have one on each side of the brain

■ Consists of two parts
● Hippocampus proper // Ammon’s horn
○ Refers to the actual structure of the hippocampus which is made
up of four regions or subfields
■ AKA: CA1, CA2, CA3, and CA4
● Use the initials of Cornu Ammonis, an earlier
name of the hippocampus.
● Dentate gyrus
○ Thought to contribute to the formation of new episodic memories
■ First connection of the trisynaptic loop
○ Has granule cells that develop after an organism is born
■ ROLES
● Assists with the storage of long term memories
○ Memory of the location of objects or people
● Helps with emotional processes
● Enabling navigation
○ Amygdala
■ DESCRIPTION
● Almond-shaped section of nervous tissue
○ Thought to be a part of the limbic system

■
■ Has been debated heavily, with evidence that the
amygdalae function independently of the limbic system
■ ROLES
 ● Perception of emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness
○ Responsible for preparing our bodies for escape or defense
■ Flight/Fight response
○ Left amygdala provides positive and negative feelings
■ Right amygdala only provides negative feelings ---> fear
conditioning
● Also helps with episodic memory and
declarative memory
● Store memories of events and emotions so that an individual may be able
to recognize similar events in the future
● If your amygdala is dysfunctional, you are likely to suffer from
depression or other forms of mental diseases
● Size of amygdala is associated with aggression. (aggressive=bigger
amygdala)
○ Cerebellum
■ DESCRIPTION
● Major feature of the hindbrain of all vertebrates
○ Has the appearance of a separate structure attached to the bottom
of the brain, tucked underneath the cerebral hemispheres
■ ROLES
● Balance + Coordination of muscles and the body
○ Does not initiate movement, but contributes to precision, and
accurate timing
● NOTE: May also be involved in some cognitive functions such as
attention and language as well as in regulating fear and pleasure
responses but is not proven yet
○ Acetylcholine
■ Composed of acetic acid and choline
● Parts in the body that use or are affected by acetylcholine --> cholinergic
○ Interfere with acetylcholine activity ----> anticholinergics
■ An organic chemical that functions in the brain and body as a neurotransmitter
● Used at the neuromuscular junction— released by motor neurons of the
nervous system release in order to activate muscles
○ Can have dangerous effects
■ FUNCTION
● Play an important role in arousal, attention, memory and motivation
○ Stimulates muscle contractions (aka all behavior)
○ Required for proper memory and cognition
○ Localization of function
■ Is the idea that different parts of the brain do different things
● Discovered at a meeting of the International Medical Congress held in
London on August 4, 1881
 ○ Originates from phrenology (the detailed study of the shape and
size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and
mental abilities)
■ Data has shown that the cerebral cortex is divided into a hierarchy of 3 areas
● Primary sensory areas at the bottom, sensory association areas, and
higher order association areas at the top
○ Information from each sense (eyes, ears, etc.) reaches the
cerebral cortex first and most directly at its own specialized areas
called its primary sensory cortex
■ Ex: auditory pathway from the ear projects most directly
to the primary auditor
○ Neuroplasticity
■ First discovered in 1973 by Terje Lømo and Tim Bliss
● Released in a publication in the Journal of Physiology
○ Experiment conducted on the synapse between the perforant path
and dentate gyrus in the hippocampi of anaesthetised rabbits
■ Is the ability of synapses to strengthen or weaken over time in response to
increases or decreases in their activity
● Often results from the alteration of the number of neurotransmitter
receptors located on a synapse
■ One of the important neurochemical foundations of learning and memory
● Hebbian theory: Proposes an explanation for the adaptation of neurons in
the brain during the learning process
○ Introduced by Donald Hebb in his book ​The Organization of
Behavior i​ n 1949
○ Neurons
■ An electrically excitable cell that receives, processes, and transmits information
through electrical and chemical signals
● Signals occur via specialized connections called synapses
○ Can connect to each other to form neural networks
■ Consists of a cell body (soma), dendrites, and an axon
● Term neurite is used to describe either a dendrite or an axon
○ Particularly in its undifferentiated stage
■ Have many functions
● Motor Neuron: receive signals from the brain and spinal cord to cause
everything from muscle contractions and affect glandular outputs
● Sensory Neuron: respond to one particular type of stimuli such as touch,
sound, or light and all other stimuli affecting the cells of the sensory
organs
● Interneurons: connect neurons to other neurons within the same region of
the brain or spinal cord in neural networks
○ Nervous system
■ Consists of two main parts
 ● Central nervous system (CNS)
○ Brain + Spinal Cord
● Peripheral nervous system (PNS)
○ Nerves that connect the CNS to the rest of the body
■ Divided into three separate subsystems
● Somatic: voluntary movement
● Autonomic: sympathetic (emergency energy) +
parasympathetic (relaxed energy)
● Enteric: Controls the gastrointestinal system.
■ Coordinates actions by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body
● Detects environmental changes that impact the body, then works in
tandem with the endocrine system to respond to such events
● An Introduction to Schemas
○ What is schema theory?
■ ORIGINS
● Accredited to British psychologist Frederick Bartlett
○ October 20, 1886 ~ September 10, 1969
■ One of the forerunners of cognitive psychology as well
as cultural psychology
● Was prominently discussed in philosophy by Immanuel Kant → emerged
Jean Piaget introduced the term schema in 1923 → Bartlett drew on the
term body schema used by neurologist Henry Head → Expanded into
schema theory by educational psychologist Richard C. Anderson
■ WHAT IS IT
● Claims that our knowledge of the world is categorized and organized by
schemas, which can influence our behaviour and cognition
○ Schemas supposedly assist recall, guides behavior, predict likely
happenings, and help us make sense of experiences
■ Pre-existing schemas may also lead to memory distortion
and
■ Note: schemas are basically a mental structure of
preconceived ideas or a framework of certain
interconnect ideas or events
■ CASE STUDY: CULTURAL SCHEMA THEORY
● Holds that human beings employ classification to understand members of
other cultures
○ Add data to previously available categories when we are exposed
to new things
● Guide our behaviors in familiar situations
○ Are shared by a group of people not a single person
○ How do schemas help structure our memories?
■ Affect the way memories are encoded and retrieved
● Especially information of long term memories
 ■ Can help us piece together memories
● Occasionally lead to false memories of how it should have happened
■ They can influence the memories of events that point them as witnesses
● TYPES OF SCHEMAS:
○ Object schemas: inform our understandings of what various
objects are and how they should function and what we expect
from them
○ Stereotypes: describes a set of characteristics that a person
associates with a group of people, assuming that all the members
of the group will abide a particular set of behaviour and traits
○ Prototypes: describes the concept of its idealist form
○ Script: activities and occasions that follow a particular schedule
of events
○ Role schema: people’s expectation of how a person in a
particular role should behave like
○ Self schema: the way we perceive at ourselves.
○ What functions do schemas perform – are they necessary?
■ WHAT DO THEY DO
● Facilitates our understanding of our environment
○ Are mental concepts used to develop and recognize an
understanding of complex ideas and objects.
■ Product of our experiences starting from a very early age
and can be adjusted or refined throughout our lives
● Can hinder our understanding of new concepts
○ Fall back on prior knowledge rather than encouraging us to try to
understand an idea anew
■ EXAMPLE
● Recognizing people, animals and objects, or processing more complex
information such as who will be at a repeating event
○ Child saw a puppy at a young age → creates a schema of this
furry creature with four legs → recognize the puppy next time he
sees it
● Stereotypes
■ IMPORTANCE
● Affect the way our memories are encoded and retrieved.
○ Would not be able to recognize things after we’ve learned and
processed them through without schemas
■ Presence of memory difficulties
○ Are schemas always reliable, or can they lead to distortions? If the latter, when are
distortions most likely?
■ DISTORTION EXAMPLE(s)
● Lead to stereotypes
○ Type of schema which assume a group all have a particular trait
 ■ Limit us to a certain first information we learn about
○ E.g. prejudice, which prevents people from seeing the world as it
is and inhibits them from taking in new information
● Excess information being stored
○ Brain has the tendency to fill in blanks and inconsistencies in a
memory
■ Making use of the imagination and similarities with
other memories
● Source amnesia
○ Remembers an information falsely
■ Is genuinely confused and is not making up a lie
○ Studies and Researchers to Explore (Examples)
■ Jean Piaget
● Aug. 9, 1896 -> Sept. 16, 1980
○ Swiss Psychologist / Epistemologist
■ Director of Int. Bureau of Education
○ Placed great importance on the education of children
■ Declared in 1934 that “only education is capable of
saving our societies from possible collapse, whether
violent, or gradual”
○ Was the “Great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing.
■ Ideas did not become widely popularized until the 1960s
● Led to the emergence of the study of
development as a major sub-discipline in
psychology
■ Greatly criticized for his oversimplification of
Development
● Worked on Cognitive Epistemology and Development
○ Stage 1: Sensorimotor (0 ~ 2 years)
■ Senses & motor functions develop rapidly
■ Can only perceive things they sense
● Lack “Object Permanence” (the idea that objects
exist even when they are not detected by the 5
senses)
○ Stage 2: Preoperational (2 ~ 7 years)
■ FIRST HALF: EGOCENTRISM
● All thoughts revolve around them
● Hard to imagine other people’s POV
■ Ability to mentally represent objects & events
■ Centration
● Tendency to only focus on one aspect of a
problem/object
 ○ ex./ the tall cup has more juice than the
short cup
● Lack Reversibility, the idea that changes can be
undone
■ SECOND HALF: THEORY OF MIND
● Acquire empathy and the ability to infer what
others are / will be thinking
○ Ex./ “Please get me a dog because…”
○ Stage 3: Concrete-Operational (7 ~ 11 years)
■ Development of concrete logical thinking
■ Decentration
● ability to see past one aspect of a problem
(opposite of Centration)
○ Stage 4: Formal-Operational (12 years and onward)
■ Post-Development
■ Maturity
■ Sir Frederic Bartlett
● 20 October 1886 ~ 30 September 1969
○ British Psychologist
■ 1st professor of Experimental Psychology @University
of Cambridge
○ Forerunner in Cognitive Psychology and Cultural Psychology
● Fun fact: He had pleurisy, aka the inflammation of the membranes
surrounding the lungs
● Remembering
○ Published in 1932
■ Most widely recognized for this book
○ Consisted of experimental studies on remembering, imagining,
and perceiving
■ Exemplified "remembering as a study in social
psychology."
○ “War of the Ghosts” (see below)
● Thinking: An Experimental and Social Study
○ Published in 1958
■ Recognized many thinking processes that humans use
■ War of Ghosts
● An experiment/study from Sir Frederic Bartlett’s ​Remembering
○ Demonstrated the constructive nature of memory and how it
could be influenced by the subjects’ schemas
○ Investigated how a memory is investigated by previous
experiences
■ E.g. cultural backgrounds, etc
● Details of the study:
 ○ Participants (British) were asked to read a Canadian Indian (aka
Native American) folklore “War of the Ghosts”
■ A group had to do serial repreoducted and another
repeated reproduction
○ Researchers found that the longer the interval between reading
the story and remembering it, the more details were omittedd
■ Details that didn’t fit in with the subject’s schema were
either omitted or transformed
● E.g. the English participants
remembering/distorting the “canoes” from the
story as “boats”
■ No significant differences in recollection between
groups
○ TYPES OF CHANGE
■ Assimilation → fit culture
■ Leveling → shorter as omit details
■ Sharpening → change terms to fit understanding + add
details and emotions
■ E.F. Loftus & J.C. Palmer
● Elizabeth Fishman Loftus
○ Oct. 16, 1944
■ American Cognitive Psychologist
● Ranked 58th out of the top 100 most influential
psychological researchers
■ Expert on memory
● Conducted many experiments on the
malleability of human memory
○ BEST KNOWN FOR WORKS ON…
■ Misinformation effect
● Investigated whether or not leading questions or
misleading new stimulus would affect the
memory of the original event
● Discovered that memory is highly open to
suggestion
■ Eyewitness memory
● Spectated & was a consultant in over 300 legal
cases involving eyewitness testimony
■ False memories
● Studied the possibility of implanting false
memories
● Found out that many subjects’ false memories
came from psycho-therapeutic treatment
 ● Many techniques used by therapists create false
memories due to the traumatic state the patients
are already in
● Loftus’s people(students/colleagues) created
many of their own techniques that prey on stress
to implant false memories
○ E.g. falsely remembering being attacked
by vicious dogs
○ Heavily involved in applying her work to legal settings
■ Worked with John C. Palmer on “Reconstruction of
Auto-Mobile Destruction”(see below)
■ Car Crash Study (aka “Reconstruction of Auto-Mobile Destruction”)
● Done by Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer
○ Aimed to show that leading questions could distort eyewitness
testimony accounts and so have a confabulating effect
■ Would become distorted by cues provided in the
question
● Details of the study:
○ EXPERIMENT #1
■ Participants were shown a clip of a car crash
● Then split into groups
■ Groups were each asked a question
● “How fast were the cars going when they * each
other?”
○ Groups each had a different verb placed
in their question (e.g. hit, bumped,
smashed, collided, contacted)
■ Participants in each group then had their answers
averaged
● Verb “smashed” had an average speed of
40.5/mph
● Verb “contacted” had an average speed of
31.8/mph
● NOTE: slight change in wording resulted in
answers that differed by more than 21%
○ EXPERIMENT #2
■ Participants were shown a 30 second clip of a car
accident and were then split into 3 groups
● Group 1: was a control group and was sent home
directly after watching the clip
● Group 2: were asked how fast were the cars
going when they “hit” each other
 ● Group 3: were asked how fast were the cars
going when they “smashed into” each other
■ 1 week later all 3 groups were brought back and given a
questionnaire
● Embedded in that questionnaire was the question
“Was there any broken glass?”, which there
wasn’t
● Group 1(control group): 12% answered yes
incorrectly
● Group 2(“hit”): 14% answered yes incorrectly
● Group 3(“smashed”): 32% answered yes
incorrectly
■ The participants “re-encoded” their memory based on
the external stimulus
■ Weapons Effect
● Phenomenon in the field of social psychology
○ Refers to the presence of weapons leading to more aggressive
behaviour in humans especially when the person is already
aroused
● First described by Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony Lepage
○ SPECIAL FOCUS: Leonard Berkowitz
■ August 11, 1926 – January 3, 2016
● American Social Psychologist
■ Best known for research on altruism and human
aggression
● Originated the Cognitive Neoassociation Model
of aggressive behavior
● Details of the Experiment:
○ 100 male participants were each randomly assigned to receive
1-7 shocks
■ Were told that the shocks came from a peer
● After they received the shocks they were
allowed to administer any amount of shocks to
the targeted peer
○ WHEN THEY WERE SHOCKED:
■ ⅓ had a rifle and a revolver next to them
■ ⅓ had badminton rackets next to them
■ ⅓ had no potential weapons near them
○ Researchers found that the highest amount of “retaliation”
shocks were administered by the participants who received 7
shocks and had the guns lying next to them
■ Acts as evidence for the given hypothesis
● Types of Memory
○ Long-term vs. Short-term
■ LONG TERM
● Involves the storage and recall of information over a long period of time,
such as days, weeks, or years
■ SHORT TERM
● Capacity for holding, but not manipulating, a small amount of
information in mind in an active, readily available state for a short period
of time
○ Lasting for a duration: 15-30 seconds
○ Explicit vs. Implicit
■ EXPLICIT
● Memory in which there is a need for conscious recollection in order to
recall something
○ In other words, explicit memory is the memory of facts and
experiences that one can consciously know (e.g. memorizing
those 15 lessons of wordly wise vocabulary words for the finals
exams)
● Includes declarative, episodic, and semantic memories
■ IMPLICIT
● Involves recollection of skills, things you know how to do, preferences,
etc., that you don't need to recall consciously
○ These are things you know how to do naturally (e.g. how to ride
a bike)
○ Declarative vs. Procedural
■ DECLARATIVE
● Memories that can be “consciously recalled (or ‘declared’)”
○ A type of explicit memory as it consists of information that is
explicitly stored and retrieved
■ Consists of episodic AND semantic memories
● Information on WHAT
○ Memory of facts and events (e.g. the capital of Greece)
■ PROCEDURAL
● Memories that are responsible for knowing how to do things
○ Done unconsciously
■ AKA: motor skills
○ Usually deals with information on how to perform certain
procedures, (e.g. walking, talking, or riding a bike)
■ Effortful to learn at first, but eventually you can do it
subconsciously
● Formed when repeated signals reinforce synapses
○ Can be as basic as forming a connection between two nerve
cells in your fingertip
 ■ Other procedural memories are more complex and take
longer to form
● Information on HOW (e.g. tying a shoelace)
○ A type of implicit memory
○ Semantic vs. Episodic
■ SEMANTIC
● Processes ideas and concepts that are not drawn from personal
experience
○ Includes information that is perceived as “common knowledge”
(e.g. the names of colors, the sounds of letters)
● Usually built up from the information we take in when we are young
○ E.g. you know the city you were born in and also know the date
of your birth, but you don’t know how you were born
● Introduced in 1972
○ Result of collaboration between Endel Tulving of the University
of Toronto and Wayne Donaldson of the University of New
Brunswick
■ Had not undergone many in-depth studies or research
before
● J.F. Kihlstrom (1980s)
○ Conducted the most notable experiments relating to semantic
memory
■ Tested hypnosis on semantic and episodic memory
■ EPISODIC
● A person’s unique memory of a specific event
○ Therefore, it will be different from another individual’s
recollection of the same experience
■ E.g. the mother and child will have unique episodic
memories of the child’s first day of school)
● STEPS TO FORMING EPISODIC MEMORIES
○ Step 1: Encoding
■ This is where the brain retrieves the information that will
be used to form episodic memories
○ Step 2: Consolidation
■ This helps store the information into the long-term
memory and makes it strongly ingrained so that it is
difficult to forget it
○ Step 3: Recollection
■ This is the act of evoking the episodic memory
pertaining to a specific incident
■ SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES
● SIMILARITIES
○ One is derived from the other
 ■
Semantic memory is formed from episodic memory in
the sense that we learn from our experiences
● e.g. learning how to use the phone (semantic)
may start out as a memory of dialing a phone
number on a toy telephone (episodic)
○ Both help form declarative memories
● DIFFERENCES
○ Presence of emotions
■ Semantic memory is not associated with how a person
feels and is just a recollection of ​simple facts​​ learned at
a young age
■ Episodic memory is heavily associated with the way a
person ​feels ​about the incident and will therefore differ
with each individual
○ Eidetic
■ Ability to remember things in exact detail, as if you can see them in your mind
● Is determined by the clarity, accuracy, and detail of the memory
○ Not limited to visual aspects of memory and includes auditory
memories and various other sensory aspects associated with the
image
● Can retrieve it from your memory at will and examine it in detail,
zooming in on different parts (kind of like how you can observe a
photograph)
○ Has an accurate mental image snapshot or photograph of an
event in their memory
■ Is mainly dependent on genetics and brain development
● Cannot be gained over time and practice
○ Rarely exists
■ Incidence is very low in children (2–10 percent) and
almost nonexistent in adults
■ Not to be confused with photographic memory
● Can be used interchangeably but actually refer to different types of
abilities
○ Eidetic - ability to view memories as photographs
○ Photographic - ability to memorize pages of text or numbers
● NOTE: TRUE photographic memory does not exist at all
○ Hyperthymestic
■ AKA Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM)
● Neurological disorder which leads people to be able to remember much
more than the average person
○ Derives from Ancient Greek: hyper- ("excessive") and thymesis
("remembering")
 ■ 3 American neurobiologists Elizabeth Parker, Larry Cahill, and James McGaugh
identified 2 main characteristics of people with Hyperthymesia
● Spending an excessive amount of time thinking about one's past
● Displaying an extraordinary ability to recall specific events from one's
past
■ Should not be confused with exceptional memory
● The memorization of subjective information through the use of
mnemonics, repeated rehearsal, or other strategies
■ PROS VS CONS
● Pros
○ Can easily recall happy memories experienced throughout your
life
● Cons
○ Subconsciously recollected negative memories can harm the
person’s relationship with his/her friends and family
■ The overloaded stream of memories can disrupt an
average day’s activities
■ “FUN” FACT
● Studies have shown that people with hyperthymesia are prone to getting
lost in remembering, making it difficult to attend to the present or future,
as they are permanently living in the past.
○ Reconstructive
■ Memories that add or omit details that were not part of the original event
● E.g. stereotypes
○ This is why some believe that eyewitnesses in crimes are not
always reliable
● Explains differences in memories
■ BARTLETT’S SCHEMA THEORY
● Proposed by Sir Frederick Bartlett
○ 20 October 1886 – 30 September 1969
■ Was a British psychologist
○ One of the forerunners of cognitive psychology
■ First professor of experimental psychology at the
University of Cambridge
● Stated that memory is not like a tape recorder: it doesn’t faithfully play
back our experiences
○ Instead, it changes or “reconstructs” them imaginatively.
○ Muscle
■ Form of procedural memory
● Genetically pre-wired
○ Know how to do it without learning
● Studies have shown that some muscle memories do not require continued
practice and observation
 ○Suggests that although most of our motor skills are acquired in
our lifetime, some are already stored once we are born
■ E.g. Facial expressions can be observed and imitated by
blind children
■ USED AREAS OF THE BRAIN:
● Motor cortices
○ Involved in the planning, control, and execution of voluntary
movements
● Somatosensory cortices
○ Receives all sensory input from the body
■ E.g. neurons that sense feelings in our skin and send
signals to the somatosensory cortex
● Prefrontal cortices
○ Contributes to personality development
○ Regulates intellectual thinking
● Frontal cortices
○ Regulates voluntary movement
○ Provides the ability to project future consequences resulting from
current actions
○ Helps with conscience
○ Collective
■ DEFINITION(S)
● Shared pool of knowledge and information in the memories of two or
more members of a social group
○ Basically, how groups remember their past
■ COLLECTIVE MEMORY
● Different groups remember different events in history
■ E.g. World War II
● When asked about the most significant events in WWII, Americans and
Russians had different answers because of their country’s stance in the
war
○ Genetic
■ A memory present at birth that exists in the absence of sensory experience
● Based on the idea that common experiences of a species become
incorporated into its genetic code
○ E.g. fears
■ Experiments done on mice show that mice who were
trained to fear a certain smell passed that trait on to their
descendants
■ HISTORY OF GENETIC MEMORY
● In the 19th century, biologists considered genetic memory to be a fusion
of memory and heredity
 ● In modern psychology, genetic memory is generally considered a false
idea
● Flashbulb Memory
○ What are flashbulb memories? How are they formed, and what differentiates them from
other memories?
■ FLASHBULB MEMORIES
● Graphic/lucid views of an event
○ Kept for a lifetime and are precise
■ A kind of autobiographical memory (organization of
events of one’s life)
● Contain six features
○ Place, current event, informer, own effect, other effect,
after-effects
■ FORMATION
● Through the use of the amygdala
○ Part of the brain that perceives emotions
■ Responsible for storing memory
● By the occurences of important/shocking events
○ Historical events or one’s personal life
● Note: is typically a memory that grabs ones attention
■ UNIQUENESS (AKA DIFFERENCES)
● More sensory detail
○ Are emotional memories
● Point is recalled accurately
○ Minor details are not as clearly remembered
● Less likely to be affected (changed) by other memories
○ People are more confident in them
○ Why do we remember some memories more vividly than others?
■ EMOTIONS
● Help emphasize specific incidents → remember more clearly
○ Also function in priming and the consolidation of memory
■ FOCUS
● Negative memories > positive memories
○ People tend to think of negative events more thoroughly than
positive events
■ EMOTIONAL VS PHYSICAL
● Especially in relation to pain or damage inflicted
○ Emotional pain is felt longer/deeper than physical pain
○ Does rehearsing a memory make it more likely to be reliable?
■ TYPES OF REHEARSING
● Maintenance rehearsal
○ Continuously reciting the information
■ Kinda like what parents/teachers call 死背
 ○ Enables one to remember for a short time
● Elaborative rehearsal
○ Thinking about the information
■ Actually understanding the material
○ Enables one to remember for a longer period of time
■ CONCLUSION
● Yes, as it allows it to be remembered more deeply (and vividly),
therefore making it less likely to be incorrectly remembered
○ However, it may be interpreted incorrectly after rehearsing,
leading the information to be unreliable
○ Are we more likely to forget memories that we don’t share out loud with friends?
■ Everyone’s memories fade away eventually
● Brain replaces the old memories with new ones
○ You probably forgot about the information when you want to
recall it again after time passes (months or years)
■ “Use it or lose it”
■ Old memories/informations will be replaced by other items, unless it is repeated
again and again
● Following the concept of the decay theory, by sharing that particular
memory with your friends, it gives the chance for you to recall it, ending
up being stored in your long-term memory.
■ GOOD LINK: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVWbrNls-Kw
○ Why are some cultures more likely to forget events as a whole?
■ CULTURE DEFINITION
● Ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society
■ REASONS
● Stories can cause a negative light on the society
○ Not something they want to remember so they forget
● Suffer in the historical memory
○ Lack of charismatic leaders
■ Want people to have the idea of their highest value and
ideals
● Political and social trauma → forgetting or neglecting
● No longer care about the past events
○ Useless information/replacing with new information
● Terms and Researchers to Explore (Examples)
○ Overt vs. Covert rehearsal
■ SIMILARITIES
● Both are forms of short-term motor memory
■ DIFFERENCES
● OVERT REHEARSAL
○ Overt: done or shown openly or plainly apparent
○ Rehearsal that can be seen or heard by others
 ● COVERT REHEARSAL
○ Covert: not openly acknowledged or displayed
○ The internal practice of a behavior or sequence of behaviors in
the absence of overt or physical movement, with the goal of
performance enhancement
○ Can be used to improve memory
■ E.g. studying for a test, preparing to deliver a speech,
trying to memorize a list etc
○ Individualistic vs. Collectivistic
■ Typically used to describe different types of cultures
■ DIFFERENCES
● INDIVIDUALISTIC CULTURES
○ Emphasize personal achievement regardless of the expense of
group goals
■ Results in a strong sense of competition
○ E.g. the United States and Europe
○ TRAITS
■ Promotes individual goals, initiative and achievement
■ Ensures self-importance and individualism
■ Relying or being dependent on others is frequently seen
as shameful
■ People strive for their own successes
● COLLECTIVISTIC CULTURES
○ Emphasize family and work group goals above individual needs
or desires
○ E.g. China, Korea, Japan
○ TRAITS
■ Each person is encouraged to do what is best for society
as a whole rather than themselves
■ The rights of families, communities, and the collective
supersede those of the individual
■ Promote unity, brotherhood, and selflessness
■ Working with others and cooperating is the norm
■ Strong cohesive group
■ NOTE/FUN FACT: Researchers have found that Western cultures tend to be
more individualistic while East Asian cultures tend to be more collectivistic
○ Emotional arousal
■ DEFINITIONS
● Appearance of strong emotions and emotional behavior
○ (arousal): a state of heightened physiological activity
● E.g.
○ Fight or Flight Response
○ Sexual arousal
 ○ Goosebumps
■ Senses become more acute and the skin prickles in
excitement
○ Neisser & Harsch
■ SPECIAL FOCUS: ULRIC NEISSER
● German-born American psychologist
○ AKA the "father of cognitive psychology"
■ Believed that “however much people think they are
remembering actual events, they are really remembering
memories”
● Published his book ​Cognitive Psychology​ in 1967
○ Mainly wrote about perception and memory
■ EXPERIMENT
● Challenged the Flash Bulb Memory theory proposed by Brown and
Kulik
○ Asked participants to report on the circumstances of their
learning about the ​Challenger​ space disaster twice: once one day
after the disaster and the other 2½ years after the disaster
■ RESULTS
● One day after: 21% of the participants reported that they had heard about
the disaster on TV
● 2½ years later: percentage rose to 45%
■ CONCLUSION
● Assuming that participants were more accurate one day after the disaster,
it can be concluded that their memory about how they had heard the
news deteriorated significantly during the 2 ½ years
● Suggests that the Flashbulb Memories are not very reliable and are just
ordinary memories
● Showed that memory is a reconstruction of the past, not an accurate
snapshot of it
○ Brown & Kulik
■ Suggested the theory of flashbulb memory
● Defined it as “memories of the circumstances in which one first learned
of a very surprising or consequential (or emotionally arousing) event”
● ACCORDING TO THEIR THEORY:
○ FBMs must form in situations where we encounter surprising
and highly emotional information
○ Are maintained by both overt (discussing with others) and covert
rehearsal (private rehearsing)
○ Differ with other memories in that they are more vivid, last
longer, and are more consistent and accurate
○ Nearly permanent memories
○ Consists of 2 factors: emotion and discussion
 ○ FOUR MAIN FACTORS OF FBMS:
■ Permanence (disputed)
■ Consistency (disputed)
● Experiments such as the one carried out by
Neisser and Harsch show that FBMS are not
permanent nor consistent
■ Confidence (better supported by research)
■ Vividness (better supported by research)
■ However, they OVERESTIMATED the permanence and consistency of
Flashbulb Memories because FBMs are:
● Long-lasting but not permanent
○ May not be any more long-lasting than important everyday
events
○ Wang & Aydin
■ Compared individualistic and collectivistic cultures and how they affected FBMs
■ RESULTS:
● Individualistic cultures
○ Emotions are part of one’s uniqueness
○ Expressing emotions is acceptable and encouraged
○ More social sharing of emotions
● Collectivistic cultures
○ Expressing emotions is discouraged
○ One should not reflect on emotional states
○ Less social sharing of emotions
● Since discussing emotions are encouraged in individualistic cultures,
FBMs are generally more common
○ Evidence:
■ Chinese participants were able to recall less public
events and thus managing to recall less FBMs
■ Only a few Japanese participants were able to for FBMs
of the nuclear accident
● Memory Aids to Explore (examples)
○ Elaborative encoding
■ A form of memorization that relates to-be-remembered information to
pre-existing memories and knowledge
● Can make such connections visually, spatially, semantically or
acoustically
■ Scope of things that can be encoded is nearly limitless
● Connections can whenever any new stimulus enters our perception
○ Actively relating new information back to previous knowledge
expands and intensifies the web of memories and mental
connections
 ● Due to such, the ability to recall encoded memories has also been a
useful tool in diagnosing mental disabilities (e.g. Alzheimer's disease)
○ Mnemonics
■ Any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval (remembering)
in the human memory
● Make use of specific tools to encode any given information in a way that
allows for efficient storage and retrieval
○ E.g. elaborative encoding
■ Based on the observation that the human mind more easily remembers "relatable"
information, rather than impersonal forms of information
● Use information already stored in long-term memory to make
memorisation an easier task
■ HISTORY
● Were much cultivated by Greek sophists and philosophers
○ Frequently referred to by Plato and Aristotle
● Poet Simonides was credited for development of these techniques
○ Only because the power of his memory was famous
○ Spaced retrieval
■ Learning technique, which requires users to rehearse information to be learned at
different and increasing spaced intervals of time or a set uniform amount of time
● Creates a deeper level of processing of the learned info in long term
memory at each point
○ Each new rehearsal is expected to have a longer or equal period
of time between itself and the previous rehearsal
■ ORIGINS
● Created to help people with dementia have a errorless and effortless
learning
○ Landauer and Bjork first studied this technique of learning in
1978
■ MODERN USAGE
● Typically studied through the use of memorizing facts
○ Has not been applied to fields that required some manipulation
or thought beyond simple factual/semantic information
○ Mind palace (more famously known as the ​Method of Loci​)
■ WHAT IT IT
● Method of memory enhancement
○ Uses visualizations with the use of spatial memory to quickly
and efficiently recall information
● Remembered things are mentally associated with specific physical
locations
○ Relies on memorized spatial relationships to establish, order, and
recollect memorial content
■ USAGE OF TERM
 ● Found in specialised works on psychology, neurobiology, and memory
○ Adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises
■ SIMILAR THINGS
● Journey Method → Used for storing lists of related items
● Roman Room technique → most effective for storing unrelated
information
○ Simonides
■ WHO HE WAS
● 556 – 468 BC
○ Was a Greek lyric poet, born at Ioulis on Ceos
■ Fame owes much to traditional accounts of his colourful
life
● Developed ​Memory Theatre
○ System of mnemonics based on images and places called the
method of loci
■ Widely used in oral societies until the Renaissance
■ MODERN USAGE
● Method of memory enhancement
○ Uses visualizations with the use of spatial memory to quickly
and efficiently recall information
■ Relies on memorized spatial relationships to establish,
order, and recollect memorial content
○ Giordano Bruno
■ WHO HE WAS
● 1548 – 17 February 1600
○ Burned at the stake for a stubborn adherence to his then
unorthodox beliefs
● Was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and
cosmological theorist
○ Wrote extensively on the art of memory, a loosely organized
group of mnemonic techniques and principles
■ INVENTION: ART OF MEMORY
● Any of a number loosely associated mnemonic principles and techniques
used organize memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the
combination and invention of ideas
○ Include….
■ Association of emotionally striking memory images
within visualized locations
■ Chaining or association of groups of images
■ Association of images with schematic graphics or notae
■ Association of text with images
● Existed as a recognized group of principles and techniques since at least
as early as the middle of the first millennium BCE
○ Nootropics
■ ORIGINS
● Word coined in 1972 by a Romanian psychologist and chemist, Corneliu
E. Giurgea
○ From the Greek words νοῦς (nous), or "mind", and τρέπειν
(trepein), meaning to bend or turn
■ WHAT THEY ARE
● Drugs to improve cognitive functions, particularly executive functions,
memory, creativity, or motivation, in healthy individuals
○ Also known as smart drugs and cognitive enhancers
● Has a debate amongst neurologists, physicians, and psychiatrists that
spans a number of issues
■ Ethics and fairness of their use
■ Concerns over adverse effects
■ Diversion of prescription drugs for nonmedical use
■ USES
● Stimulants to wake people up
○ E.g. caffeine
● Illegally used to boost ability
○ Eg. dimethylamylamine and methylphenidate
● Treat cognitive or motor function difficulties attributable to disorders
○ E.g. Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's
disease, and ADHD
○ Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
■ WHAT IT IS (DEFINITION 1/PSYCH)
● Noninvasive procedure that uses magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells
in the brain to improve symptoms of depression
○ Typically used when other depression treatments haven't been
effective
● Doesn’t really have risks as it is noninvasive
○ Unlike other ways, it does not induce seizures
■ WHAT IT IS (DEFINITION 2/DIAGNOSTIC)
● Measures the connection between the brain and a muscle
○ Evaluates damage from disorders and injuries affecting the facial
and other cranial nerves and the spinal cord
■ HOW IT WORKS
● Electromagnetic coil is placed against scalp near forehead → delivers a
magnetic pulse
○ Stimulates nerve cells in the region of brain involved in mood
control and depression
■ May activate regions of the brain that have decreased
activity in people with depression
■ SIDE EFFECTS
 ● Headache
● Scalp discomfort at the site of stimulation
● Tingling, spasms or twitching of facial muscles
● Lightheadedness
● Additional Terms to Know
○ Chunking
■ Term describing the action of breaking bigger things up into smaller pieces to
further facilitate them.
● Originates from “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.”
○ AKA that the maximum number of numbers in a row a human
can remember in one go cannot exceed more than “seven plus or
minus two”
■ Introduced in the book “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some
Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information”
● Created by George A. Miller
○ Used as a strategy to remember things that exceed the number
■ EXAMPLE
● 12365471892 might be broken up into 123 654 71892 for easier
remembrance
○ Priming
■ An unconscious response where a stimulus instigates a specific response to a
subsequent stimulus
● Works best when the two stimuli are in the same modality or between
two related words
■ EXAMPLE
● If shown a picture of a banana and told the word yellow, one would
quickly associate the two the next time one of them comes up.
○ Interference
■ Theory that states that memories interfere with each other, whether it is the past
affecting the present or vice versa
■ TYPES
● Proactive interference (Past->Present)
○ Forgetting because of events/learning in the past that occurred
prior to the material needed to be remembered
■ for example, occur with telephone numbers. When trying
to recall a new phone number, the old phone number you
have previously had for years could proactively interfere
with the recall, to the point when it is very difficult to
remember the new number.
● Retroactive interference (Present->Past)
○ Having trouble recalling or forgetting past memories because of
newly learned information
 ■ An example would be calling your
ex-boyfriend/girlfriend by your new
boyfriend/girlfriend’s name. The new name retroactively
interferes with the old one, which is clearly problematic
for recall.
● Note: they are reverse of each other
○ Memory Inhibition
■ Ability to choose not to remember a certain piece of irrelevant information
● Type of cognitive inhibition
○ Stopping or overriding of a mental process, in whole or in part,
with or without intention
● Critical component of an effective memory system
○ Is adaptive because it facilitates rapid, efficient recollection
■ Kills irrelevant things from your memory
■ DEBATE: INTERFERENCE VS INHIBITION
● When a person needs to remember where they put their bag, they would
not want to remember all the places they have ever put their bag, and
would therefore forget about it (aka inhibition)
○ However, this can be defined under the terms of retroactive
interference, for it fits the description in which newly acquired
information hinders the remembering of past events
○ Working Memory Model
■ ORIGINS
● Created 1974 by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch
○ Done in hopes of explaining short term memory (also referred to
as primary memory)
■ FUNCTIONS
● The model separates primary memory into 3 parts: the central executive,
slave systems, and episodic buffers
○ Central executive: the control center
■ A flexible system responsible for cognitive responses
and processes
■ Works as a supervisory system that ensures primary
memory is working and prevents it from going astray
○ Slave systems: Phonological loop and Visuo-spatial working
memory
■ Phonological loop is a slave system that is responsible
for processing auditory and phonological information
● Is further separated into 2 parts: short term
phonological store (that has a rapid decaying
effect), and articulatory rehearsal component
(that revives the memory traces obtained in the
first part)
 ■ Visuo-spatial working memory is a storage place where
visual information is kept for short amount of time. It
does not cross over with the phonological loop, and is
instead its own slave system.
● In this slave system, memory does not decay
after a short amount of time. Instead, it is
retained and is able to be manipulated.
○ Episodic Buffers: the linking thread
■ The episodic buffers are said to link information across
different domains, including visual, spatial, and verbal. It
acts as a backup storage for the two slave systems.
■ It is also recognized to connect short term memory and
long term memory.
○ Multi-Store Model
■ AKA Atkinson-Shriffin model
● Proposed by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shriffin
■ FUNCTION
● States that memory is comprised of 3 components (not to be confused
with those of the working memory model): sensory register, short-term
store, and long-term store.
○ Sensory register: where sensory information enters the brain
■ Two components: Iconic memory and Echoic memory
● Iconic memory: information registered limited
only to the field of vision and the visual system
● Echoic memory: information registered limited
to the hearing and auditory system
○ Short-term store (working memory): retains and rehearses input
from the sensory register and the long-term store
■ (See: chunking) Has a maximum capacity of seven plus
or minus two amount of information
○ Long-term store: where information rehearsed in the short-term
store is retained indefinitely
■ Information is taken from the short-term store and is
retained indefinitely by repeated rote repetition and
stronger encoding systems
■ Basically, repeated rehearsal provides better memory
○ Levels of Processing
■ A theory proposed by Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart in 1972
● States that the deeper the analysis of something, the longer its memory
traces last
○ Contradicts multi-store model on the point that repeated
rehearsal is the key to long term memory
● Argued that rehearsal simply consists of repetition and not new analysis
 ■ Involve different depths of processing, generally producing higher recall value in
certain senses than others
● Vision > touch, smell, hearing
■ SUPPORTING FACTORS
● Familiarity
○ Stimulus will have a higher recall value if it is highly compatible
with pre-existing semantic structures
■ Because such a stimulus will have many connections to
other encoded memories
● Activated based on closeness in semantic
network structure
● Specificity of processing
○ Describes the increased recall value of a stimulus when
presented in the method with which it was imputed
● Implicit memory tests
○ Measure the recall value of a particular stimulus based on later
performance on stimulus-related tasks
○ Humor effect
■ States that things that one finds humorous are more likely to be remembered than
those that aren’t
● Type of cognitive bias (aka a memory bias that either impairs or
improves the likelihood of a memory being recalled)
■ CASE STUDY:
● Done by psychological scientists David Cheng and Lu Wang of the
University of New South Wales
○ Found that people who watched a funny video clip spent twice as
long on a tedious task compared to people who watched neutral
or positive (but not funny) videos
● Hypothesized that humor may provide a respite from stressful situations
○ Facilitate the replenishment of mental resources
■ Ultimately allowing people to persist longer on difficult
tasks and helping them remember
○ Generation effect
■ States that things are easier remembered if they are generated by one’s own mind
than simply read
● Typically achieved in cognitive psychology experiments by asking
participants to generate words from word fragments
■ Is scientifically unproven
● Currently no explanations for this phenomenon
■ POTENTIAL CAUSES
● Lexical Activation Hypothesis
○ Participant must search his or her semantic memory during the
process of generation
 ● Procedural account
○ Argues that people are more likely to engage in particular
cognitive procedures during the encoding of items when
generating than when reading
● Multifactor transfer-appropriate processing account
○ Says that the generation task forces participants to focus their
processing on the type of information needed to solve the
generation task
○ Positivity effect
■ DEFINITION ONE
● An age related trend that states that older people are more likely to
remember positive things than negative things
■ DEFINITION TWO (attributional bias)
● Ability to constructively analyze a situation where the desired results are
not achieved
○ Still obtain positive feedback that assists our future progression
● Pertains to the tendency of people when evaluating the causes of the
behaviors of a person they like or prefer
○ Typically attribute the person's inherent disposition as the cause
of their positive behaviors and the situations surrounding them as
the cause of their negative behaviors

When Memory Goes Awry

● What Memory?
○ Would it ever be ethical to change or remove someone else’s memories?
■ YES, as it can free us to be who we wish
● Relieve people of nightmares and other disorders
○ E.g. PTSD, which is a result of endogenous stress hormones
■ Solidify the memory, making them more easily triggered
by small cues and signs that relate to them.
● Memory modulating technologies allows
removal of these traumatic experiences
○ E.g. Hyperthymesia, where one remembers too much
■ Become emotionally overbearing and results in
confusion
● Remove memories that stop us from being who we are
○ Possible that memories, or implicit behavior as a result of
memories, may block us from actualizing our potential, block us
from becoming certain types of people that we have decided
would be in our self interest
■ NO, as it may change a person’s behaviours and personality completely
● People are changed and shaped by their experiences, which become
memories
 ○ Personality and behaviours are decided by what we go through.
● No one knows if removing a specific memory or experience will change
one’s personality
○ E.g. If an adult used to get bullied as a child, he might be an
understanding and loving person. However, the experiences and
memories of being bullied was horrible and he wanted to remove
that. There is a possibility this would change his personality and
behaviours.
○ Is there any way to know for sure whether our memories are accurate?
■ There are ways to improve your memory, but there isn’t any way to corroborate
if your memory is accurate
● However, some may say that you can confirm your memory through a
third source (aka double checking)
○ E.g. How a person looks like through a photo
○ E.g. Ask someone about an event that happened last night that
you slightly remember
■ Memories are often distorted
● Done through repression, bias, etc
○ How accurate is eyewitness testimony? Can it be misleading, and can it be improved?
■ Memories are stored in schemas (refer to that section below)
● Capable of distorting unfamiliar or unconsciously ‘unacceptable’
information in order to ‘fit in’ with our existing knowledge
○ Results in unreliable eyewitness testimony
● Stories change as they are told
■ Human nature to be flawed
● Result in bias and/or incorrect recollection
■ Can be affected/mislead by many psychological aspects
● Anxiety / Stress
● Reconstructive Memory
● Weapon Focus
● Leading Questions
■ IMPROVEMENT?
● The eyewitness should not be given time to give his/her answer
○ A strong memory has a strong presence in mind and should be
able to be described immediately
○ E.g. During a police lineup, the witness should be given only two
or three seconds to identify the perpetrator, and asked about how
confident they are with their answer instead of a yes or no.
○ Do people from different cultures and societies remember the same things differently in
predictable ways?
■ YES
● See something presented to oneself and process it so that it makes the
most sense (Because of schemas)
 ○ Such has to do with the social norms and the culture they live
with, and it is predictable through understanding the society and
culture
● Different cultures have different value systems and perspectives
○ What to one culture would seem a valiant conquest could, to
onlookers, look as a series of atrocities and criminal actions.
■ NO
● Individual self may not be largely influenced by your culture and society
○ Have your own thoughts and process of what is presented.
■ Has nothing to do with the societal norm and culture
○ To what extent can we trust decisions made by those without sound memory?
■ NOT MUCH
● Often wrong as they remember incorrect facts
○ Decisions may not fit the circumstance properly
● Can be easily tricked by people with bad motives
○ Informed incorrectly, memories replaced, etc
■ Happens easily enough to people with sound memory
(and judgement) so imagine how bad it’d get
■ EQUALLY AS MUCH
● People of sound judgement and memory still often deceive others
○ Those without such may not be able to deceive others (and be
more simple honest) as they can barely remember the right thing
● Still have the capability to make decisions
○ Are not absent minded all the time nor completely incapacitated
or else they wouldn’t be able to survive
■ MORE THAN USUAL
● Do not have the capability to be biased, as they cannot remember past
experiences
○ More straightforward based off of recent events that are easily
remembered
■ Confirmation bias cannot occur
● Only remember important things that have to make a big enough impact
to be ingrained deep enough
● On the Tip of the Tongue
○ Decay theory
■ Proposes that memory fades due to the mere passage of time
● Information is therefore less available for later retrieval as time passes
and memory, as well as memory strength, wears away
○ Actively rehearsing information is believed to be a major factor
counteracting this temporal decline
● Mostly affects the short-term memory system
○ Older memories (in long-term memory) are often more resistant
to shocks or physical attacks on the brain
 ■ Term was first coined by Edward Thorndike in his book The Psychology of
Learning in 1914
● Simply states that if a person does not access and use the memory
representation they have formed the memory trace will fade or decay
over time
○ Criticized as it cannot be proved as a mechanism
○ Motivated forgetting
■ A type of theorized psychological behavior where people may forget unwanted
memories, either consciously or unconsciously
● Considered an example of defence mechanism
○ Are unconscious or conscious coping techniques used to reduce
anxiety arising from unacceptable or potentially harmful
impulses
● Painful and disturbing memories are made unconscious and very difficult
to retrieve, but still remain in storage
■ HOW IT OCCURS
● Activity that occurs within the prefrontal cortex
○ Areas are associated with stopping unwanted actions and
emotions and motivation
■ Was discovered by testing subjects while taking a
functional MRI of their brain
● Hippocampus being suppressed
○ Is responsible for the formation and recollection of memories
○ Gaslighting
■ Form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or
in members of a targeted group
● Done using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying
○ Hope to make them question their own memory, perception, and
sanity (destabilizing them)
■ Term owes its origin to the 1938 Patrick Hamilton play Gas Light and its 1940
and 1944 film adaptations
● Has been used in clinical and research literature
○ Amnesia
■ Deficit in memory caused by brain damage, disease, or psychological trauma
● Typically associated with the damage to the medial temporal lobe
○ Memories can be either wholly or partially lost due to the extent
of damage that was caused
● Ability to recall immediate information is still retained and new
memories can be formed
○ Severe reductions in the ability to learn new material and retrieve
old information can be observed
■ TWO TYPES
● Retrograde amnesia
 ○ Inability to retrieve information that was acquired before a
particular date, usually the date of an accident or operation.
■ Memory loss can extend back decades
● Anterograde amnesia
○ Inability to transfer new information from the short-term store
into the long-term store
■ Cannot remember things for long periods of time
● NOTE: These two types are not mutually exclusive; both can occur
simultaneously
○ TBI (aka traumatic brain injury)
■ Occurs when an external force injures the brain
● Consequence of a sudden acceleration or deceleration within the cranium
or by a complex combination of both movement and sudden impact
○ One of two subsets of acquired brain injury
● Major cause of death and disability worldwide
○ Especially in children and young adults
■ Fun fact: Males sustain traumatic brain injuries more
frequently than do females
■ Is classified based on severity, mechanism, and other features
● Can result in physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral
symptoms
○ Outcome can range from complete recovery to permanent
disability or death
■ Symptoms are dependent on the type of TBI (diffuse or focal) and the part of the
brain that is affected
● E.g. Unconsciousness tends to last longer for people with injuries on the
left side of the brain than for those with injuries on the right
○ Blackouts
■ DEFINITION (1)
● Phenomenon caused by the intake of any substance or medication in
which short term and long term memory creation is impaired
○ Most frequently associated with GABAergic drugs
● Described as having effects similar to that of anterograde amnesia
○ Subject cannot recall any events after the event that caused
amnesia
■ DEFINITION (2)
● Complete loss of consciousness (aka syncope which is fainting)
○ Has a fast onset, short duration, and spontaneous recovery
● Caused by a decrease in blood flow to the brain
○ Usually from low blood pressure
● SYMPTOMS
○ Lightheadedness, sweating, pale skin, blurred vision, nausea,
vomiting, or feeling warm.
○ Nostalgia
■ Is basically sentimentality for the past
● Typically for a period or place with happy personal associations
○ Has been linked to biases in memory as people believe the past
was better than the present
■ INTERPRETATION
● In the past
○ Considered a potentially debilitating and sometimes fatal
medical condition expressing extreme homesickness
● In the present
○ Can be found to improve mood, increase social connectedness,
enhance positive self-regard, and provide existential meaning
■ Serve more than one function usually
■ HOW IT OCCURS
● Processing of smell and touch
○ First passing through the amygdala, the emotional seat of the
brain
■ WORD ORIGINS
● Coined by a 17th-century medical student to describe the anxieties
displayed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home
○ Greek compound, consisting of νόστος (nóstos), meaning
"homecoming", a Homeric word, and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning
"pain" or "ache"
○ Alzheimer’s
■ Most common form of dementia that is not a normal effect of aging
● Is a progressive disease, where dementia symptoms gradually worsen
over a number of years
○ Has no current cure, but treatments for symptoms are available
and research continues
■ Is a neurodegenerative disease
● Progressive brain cell death happens over a course of time
○ Total brain size shrinks with Alzheimer's - the tissue has
progressively fewer nerve cells and connections.
● Thought to occur with the help of plaques and tangles
○ Plaques are deposits of a protein fragment called beta-amyloid
that build up in the spaces between nerve cells
○ Tangles are twisted fibers of another protein called tau that build
up inside cells
■ SYMPTOMS
● Difficulty….
○ Remembering newly learned information (appears early)
○ Planning and Solving Problems
○ Completing Familiar Tasks
 ○ Determining Time or Place
○ Making decisions
● Loss of…
○ Vision
○ Memory
○ Items
○ Dementia
■ Term for a decline in mental ability severe enough to interfere with daily life
● Alzheimer's disease accounts for 60 to 80 percent of cases
○ Vascular dementia, which occurs after a stroke, is the second
most common dementia type
● Often incorrectly referred to as "senility" or "senile dementia”
■ Caused by damage to brain cells
● Interferes with the ability of brain cells to communicate with each other
○ When brain cells cannot communicate normally, thinking,
behavior and feelings can be affected.
■ SYMPTOMS
● An impairment of the following abilities
○ Memory, communication and language, ability to focus and pay
attention, reasoning and judgment, visual perception
○ Korsakoff’s syndrome
■ Chronic memory disorder caused by severe deficiency of thiamine (vitamin B-1)
● Most commonly caused by alcohol misuse
○ Preceded by an episode of Wernicke encephalopathy, which is
an acute brain reaction to severe lack of thiamine
■ HOW IT WORKS
● Severe thiamine deficiency disrupts several biochemicals that play key
roles in carrying signals among brain cells and in storing and retrieving
memories
○ Disruptions destroy brain cells and cause widespread
microscopic bleeding and scar tissue
■ SYMPTOMS
● Problems learning new information, inability to remember recent events
and long-term memory gaps
■ FUN FACT(S)
● There are no specific lab tests or brain scan procedures to confirm that a
person has this disorder
● Has no treatments but doctors recommend people take oral supplements
of thiamine and other vitamins under their doctor's supervision
○ Flashback
■ Psychological phenomenon in which an individual has a sudden, usually
powerful, re-experiencing of a past experience or elements of a past experience
● AKA involuntary recurrent memory
 ○ Cannot be recognized as a memory and feels real
■ IMPLICATED REGIONS OF THE BRAIN
● Medial temporal lobes
○ Mainly in charge of memory
● Precuneus
○ Linked to visuospatial imagery
● Posterior cingulate gyrus
○ Linked to emotions and memory
● Prefrontal cortex
○ PTSD
■ Mental health condition that's triggered by a terrifying event
● Key factors in diagnosis include..
○ Forgetting, or the inability to recall a portion of a traumatic event
● Can be prevented and healed through therapy
■ CAUSES
● Stressful experiences
● Inherited mental health risks (e.g. family history of anxiety and
depression)
● Inherited features of your personality — often called your temperament
■ FOUR TYPES OF SYMPTOMS
● Intrusive memories
○ Flashbacks, nightmares, emotional distress/physical reactions to
triggers of the event
● Avoidance
○ Trying to avoid thinking or talking about the traumatic event
along with reminders (e.g places)
● Negative changes in thinking and mood
○ Hopelessness about the future, negative thoughts, lack of interest
in activities you once enjoyed, feeling emotionally numb and
detached
● Changes in physical and emotional reactions
○ Being easily startled or frightened, always being on guard for
danger, trouble concentrating, overwhelming guilt or shame
○ Dissociation
■ Any of a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate
surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experience
● Involves a detachment from reality, rather than a loss of reality as in
psychosis
■ Are sometimes triggered by trauma
● May be preceded only by stress, psychoactive substances
○ Sometimes (typically) has no identifiable trigger at all
■ Commonly displayed on a continuum
 ● Can be regarded as a coping mechanism in seeking to master, minimize
or tolerate stress – including boredom or conflict
○ E.g. daydreaming
● Can also result in a lack of personality
○ E.g. depersonalization disorder
● Biases and Fallacies
○ Seven Sins of Memory
■ WHAT IS IT:
● A book written by Daniel Lawrence Schacter
■ AUTHOR
● American psychologist
○ Professor of psychology at Harvard University
■ Conducts research and teaches there
■ Focuses on psychological and biological aspects of human memory & amnesia
● Transience
○ Is the general deterioration of a specific memory
■ States that much more can be remembered of RECENT
events than events in the PAST
○ Caused because of interference
■ Proactive interference
● OLD information prevents the ability to
remember NEW information
■ Retroactive interference (vice-versa)
● NEW information prevents the ability to
remember OLD information
● Absent-Mindedness
○ Is a form of memory breakdown
■ Involves problems at the point where attention and
memory interfere
● Do not remember because one was staring into
space and thinking about other stuff
○ EXAMPLES
■ Misplacing keys/glasses and/or forgetting appointments
● Blocking
○ A memory causing something else to not be remembered
■ Occurs when the brain tries to retrieve or encode
information and another memory interferes with it
○ Is the primary cause of “tip of the tongue phenomenon”
■ Failing to retrieve a word from memory and a feeling
that retrieval in imminent
● Misattribution
○ A correct recollection of information but a incorrect recollection
of the information source
 ● Suggestibility
○ Quality of being inclined to accept and act on the suggestions of
others where false but plausible information is given
■ One fills in the gaps in certain memories with false
information when recalling a scenario or moment.
○ Similar to misattribution
■ Inclusion of overt suggestion
○ EXAMPLE
■ When a person sees a crime being committed by a
redheaded man, but after reading an article in the
newspaper saying that the crime was committed by a
blond, the witness “remembers” a blond instead of a
redhead
● Bias
○ When one’s current feelings and worldview distort remembrance
of past events
● Persistence
○ Unwanted recall of information that is disturbing
■ Can lead to PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), the
formation of phobias, or even suicide
■ RELATION TO THEME
● Failures in memory → human flaws → cause entanglement
○ Self-serving bias
■ WHAT IS IT
● People’s tendencies to attribute positive events to their own character
BUT they attribute negative events to external factors (i.e other people,
etc.)
■ EXAMPLES
● After a car crash, both parties blame the other driver for causing the
crash
● A member of a basketball team manages to make a 3-pointer during the
last seconds of a game and he attributes this to his own skill.
○ Rosy retrospection
■ WHAT IS IT
● Exaggerating the positives of past events and minimizing the negatives
■ Appears strongest with events that were only moderately pleasant (at the time)
● Can also happen with other events
○ Negative memories fade away faster than the positive memories
of that event
■ EXAMPLES
● A memory of a camping trip where you remember the good things (like
the good food, the fun with your friends/family, etc.) and you forget the
 negative sides of the event (heat, mosquitoes, your annoying siblings,
etc.)
○ Confabulation
■ WHAT IS IT
● Is the disruption of memory
○ Production of distorted, fabricated, or misinterpreted memories
about themselves or the world
■ No intention to deceive (basically the person doesn’t
know that he/she is telling false information)
● Can be a symptom of some mental diseases such as Alzheimer’s and
aneurysms
■ FOUR TYPES
● Verbal
○ Spoken false memories
● Behavioral
○ Occurs when an individual acts on his/her false memories
● Spontaneous (or primary)
○ Confabulations do not happen in response to a cue
■ Rare, most common in cases of dementia
● Provoked (momentary, or secondary)
○ Confabulations represent a normal response to a wrong memory
■ Common in dementia + amnesia
■ WORD ORIGIN
● Early 17th century
○ From Latin ​confabulat-​ ‘chatted together’, from the verb
confabulari,​ from ​con-​‘together’ + ​fabulari​ (from f​ abula​ ‘fable’).
○ Repression
■ DEFINITION
● Psychological attempt made by an individual to direct one's own desires
and impulses toward pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from
one's consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious
○ Basically placing uncomfortable thoughts in inaccessible places
in the unconscious mind
■ EXAMPLES
● When things occur that we can't deal with, we push them away and hope
that they will fade on their own accord (or plan to deal with them later)
○ Memory implantation
■ WHAT IS IT
● A technique used in psychology to investigate human memory
○ Researchers make people believe that they remember an event
even though it never actually happened
● Techniques were developed in the 1990s as a way of providing evidence
of how easy it is to distort people's memories of past events
 ■ EXAMPLES
● In a criminal case against Paul Ingram (accused by his daughters of
recurring sexual abuse during their childhood)
● Psychologist Richard Ofshe told Ingram of a made-up scenario and told
him it was an accusation made by his children
○ He could not remember anything about it right away, but after a
short time he came up with a written confession where he
described it in detail
○ The children confirmed to Ofshe that the event never happened,
and Ofshe considered this a successful memory implantation
○ The Memory Wars
■ WHAT IS IT
● A 1995 book about Sigmund Freud and recovered memory therapy
○ Written by the critic Frederick Crews
■ Reprinted articles written in the ​New York Times
● Stated that psychoanalysis is a spurious, ineffective pseudoscience, based
on the fudged data of an unscrupulous and calculating founder
○ Sees the recovered memory movement as the most recent, and
most dangerous, development of Freud’s ideas
● A result of a controversy in ​The New York Review of Books
○ Contains essays and letters wrote to the editor
■ WHO WAS SIGMUND FREUD
● 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939
○ Czech Republic/Austrian neurologist
● Founder of psychoanalysis
○ Remains influential within psychology, psychiatry, and
psychotherapy, and across the humanities
● Developed therapeutic techniques
○ E.g. use of free association and discovered transference
■ Established its central role in the analytic process
■ AUTHOR
● American essayist + literary critic born in 1993
○ Has published a variety of skeptical and rationalist essays and
handbooks for writers
■ Received popular attention for The Pooh Perplex (1963),
a book of satirical essays parodying contemporary
casebooks
● Was a prominent participant in the "Freud wars" of the 1980s and 1990s
○ Aka a debate over the reputation, scholarship and impact on the
20th century of the founder of psychoanalysis
○ Memory Conformity
■ WHAT IS IT
● Social contagion of memory
 ○ A situation where one or more persons memory influences one
or more persons report of that event
● Prominent in situations involving social interaction, media broadcasting
and eyewitness testimony
○ Can occur when individuals discuss what they saw or
experienced
■ Result in the memories of those involved being
influenced by the report of another person towards
conformity
■ EXAMPLES
● In 2003, after the murder of Swedish prime minister Anna Lindh,
witnesses were put in a room together
○ They discussed the scene of the crime together in the room (what
they were told NOT to do)
■ They left the room influenced by each other, therefore
providing false information to the police about the
perpetrator
○ Their descriptions of the perpetrator (Mijailo Mijailovic) did not
match the actual person
■ The cause of this false search was caused by the witness
discussion that happened
○ Telescoping effect (aka telescoping bias)
■ WHAT IS IT
● Remembering the time wrong (usually with a 3 year long shift in frame)
○ TYPES
■ Temporal displacement of events where people perceive
recent events as being more remote than they actually
are (​backwards telescoping OR time expansion)
■ Perceiving distant events more recent than they actually
are ​(Forward telescoping)
● Occur because of forces that impair memory and time perception
○ E.g. lack of salience
■ ORIGINS
● Attributed to an article by Neter and Waksberg
○ Published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association
in 1964
● Term comes from the idea that time seems to shrink toward the present in
the way that the distance to objects seems to shrink when they are viewed
through a telescope
■ EXAMPLE
● In the case of Ferdi Elsas (a kidnapper + murderer in the Netherlands)
 ○ He was sentenced to prison, and when he was let out, most of the
general population didn’t believe that he was in prison for long
enough
○ Because of forward telescoping, the population believed that his
sentence started much later than it actually had
○ Recall Bias
■ WHAT IS IT
● Systematic error caused by differences in the accuracy or completeness
of the recollections regarding events or experiences from the past
○ also referred to as response bias, responder bias or reporting bias
● Can be a methodological issue in research that involves interviews or
questionnaires
○ Potentially leading to differential misclassification of various
types of exposure
● Particular concern in retrospective studies that use a case-control design
to investigate the etiology of a disease or psychiatric condition
■ EXAMPLE
● In studies of risk factors for breast cancer, women who have had the
disease may search their memories more thoroughly than unaffected
controls to try to recall exposure to factors that have been mentioned in
the press, such as use of oral contraceptives
■ METHODS TO STOP IT
● Include a "wash out period"
○ AKA a substantial time period that must elapse between the
subject's first observation and their subsequent observation of the
same event

Technologies of Remembrance

● Guiding Questions
○ Can technologies help us to remember things?
■ Helps mostly with events or facts we’ve encountered in the past
● Can allow us to put things down and remember them later on
○ However we will have to refer to it a lot to process it into your
long term memory
● Saves us the burden of remembering endless details
○ Apps/functions such as siri
■ Can potentially help with prospective memory
● Reminders on phones/computers, etc
○ However increases our reliance which might not be good in the
long run
○ Can they help us to forget them?
■ Can help us forget things in a negative way
 ● According to Kaspersky Lab, 36% of 6,000 people remember things by
using their phones rather than actually trying really hard to remember
○ 24% of the 36% admit that they forget these things right after
they use it
■ Prevents the build-up of long-term memories due to the reliance on technology
● People just search them up
○ Internet becoming the brain’s external hard drive
■ WEIRD IDEAS
● Information overload makes it harder to retain information
○ Cause us to lose sight of the big picture
● Distractions make it difficult to form memories
● Elements of Memory in a Digital Age to Explore (Examples)
○ Jacquard loom
■ HISTORY
● First demonstrated in 1801 at Lyon, France
○ 1803: A loom in Paris suggested various improvements in his
own and it was modified to fit such
● By 1812 there were 11,000 looms in use in France
○ Its advantage secured its adoption
● Was declared public property in 1806
○ Jacquard was rewarded with a pension and a royalty on each
machine
■ FUNCTION
● Was used for weaving silk at Stonehouse in Lanarkshire in the 19th
century
○ Was originally opposed to since people were afraid it would
deprive them of their jobs
● Enabled unskilled workers to weave beautiful and complex patterns in
silk
○ Involves the use of thousands of punch cards laced together
■ Each row of punched holes corresponded to a row of a
textile pattern
● Introduced greater efficiency to the weaving process
○ Allows the weaver to produce, unaided, fabrics with patterns of
almost unlimited size and complexity
● Laid the foundation for modern computer programming
■ ORIGINS
● Joseph Marie Jacquard
○ French silk weaver
■ Lead to the invention of computer punch cards and data
processing
○ Inherited two looms, among other holdings when his father died
 ■ Used his spare time in constructing his improved loom
while he worked at a factory
■ RELATION TO THEME:
● Helped people “remember” how to properly weave
○ Still exists after many years → memory
○ Punch card
■ WHAT IS IT
● A piece of paper that contains any kinds of digital information
○ Represented by the presence and absence of the holes
■ Preserves data
● Widely used through much of the 20th century
○ Data processing industry
■ Specialized and increasingly complex unit record
machines used punched cards for data input, output, and
storage
● Now used in office automation and computing
○ Launched the transition from doing math to processing data
■ Laid the foundation of modern computer programming
■ ORIGINS
● Herman Hollerith
○ Founded the ​Tabulating Machine Company i​ n 1896
■ Was later renamed IBM
○ Invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be
read by a machine
■ Prior uses had been for control instead
● Semen Korsakov
○ Known for his early involvement in information technology
■ Announced his new method and machines in September
1832
● Did not want a patent :))))
○ Stored-program computer
■ WHAT IS IT
● Any computer that stores program instructions in electronic memory
○ Keeps its instructions and data in RAM
■ Treatment of programs and data in memory be
interchangeable or uniform
● Is an advancement over the program-controlled computer in the 1940s
○ Important because instructions can be stored in memory and
deleted in sequence referencing the data it needs
■ TYPES
● Von Neumann architecture
○ Stores program data and instruction data in the same memory
● Harvard architecture
 ○ Has separate memories for storing program and instruction data
■ ORIGINS
● John Von Neumann
○ American Mathematician
○ Introduced the idea of stored programmed computers in the late
1940s
○ Drum memory (magnetic drum)
■ WHAT IS IT
● A magnetic storage device widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s
as computer memory
○ Formed the main working memory of the computer
■ In some cases also used for secondary storage
○ Played an important role in the computer memory development
■ Were displaced as primary computer memory by
magnetic core memory
● HOW IT WORKS:
○ A metal cylinder is coated with a magnetic iron-oxide material,
which is where it stores the data
■ Similar to how modern disk drives use magnetism to
store data
■ ORIGINS
● Gustav Tauschek
○ Was an Austrian pioneer of Information technology
■ Developed numerous improvements for punched
card-based calculating machines from 1922 to 1945.
○ Invented the drum memory in 1932
○ Metadata
■ Is data that describes other data
● Summarizes basic information about data which can make finding and
working with instance data easier
■ TYPES
● Descriptive metadata
○ Describes a resource for purposes such as discovery and
identification
■ Can include elements such as title, abstract, author, and
keywords.
● Structural metadata
○ About containers of data and indicates how compound objects
are put together
■ E.g. how pages are ordered to form chapters
○ Describes the types, versions, relationships and other
characteristics of digital materials
● Administrative metadata
 ○ Provides information to help manage a resource
■ E.g. when and how it was created, file type and other
technical information, and who can access it
○ Digitization
■ Process of converting information into a digital format
● Digitizing information makes it easier to preserve, access, and share
● Information organized into small units of data called bits
○ Multiple-bit groups = bytes (aka the bytes in MB and KB)
■ Becomes binary data that computers and many devices
with computing capacity (digital cameras, digital hearing
aids etc.) can process
■ PROCESS
● Text and images digitized similarly
○ Scanner turns images (which may have been a text file) into an
image file, such as a bitmap (basically the bits are mapped out so
they’re in specific places)
■ Optical character recognition (OCR) program analyzes a
text image for light and dark areas in order to identify
each alphabet letter or numeric digit, and converts each
character into an ASCII code (code that assigns a
number to each letter)
● Audio and video digitization uses one of many analog-to-digital
conversion processes
○ A continuously variable (analog) signal is changed, without
altering its essential content, into a multi-level (digital) signal
○ Process of sampling measures the amplitude (signal strength) of
an analog waveform at evenly spaced time markers and
represents the samples as numerical values for input as digital
data
■ FUN FACT: According to an article in​ The Guardian​ in March 2007, if all
spoken language since the dawn of time were digitized, it would consume five
exabytes of storage space
● Total digital information in 2006 was estimated at 161 billion exabytes.
Email alone made up six exabytes of that figure.
○ Caching
■ Process of storing data in a cache (temporary storage area)
● Read cache (name of a process most web servers use)
○ Files automatically requested by a webpage are stored on a hard
disk in a cache subdirectory under the browser directory
○ Return to page you've recently looked at→ browser gets the files
from the cache rather than the original server
■ Saves time and saves the network the burden of
additional traffic
 ■ Cache: place to store something temporarily in a computing environment
● Active data is often cached to shorten data access times, reduce latency
(delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction for its
transfer) and improve input/output (I/O)
○ Because almost all application workload is dependent upon I/O
operations, caching is used to ​improve application performance
■ Cache algorithms
● Provide instructions for how the cache should be maintained
○ Least Frequently Used (LFU): ​Counter to keep track of how
often an entry is accessed
■ Entry with the lowest count is removed first
○ Least Recently Used (LRU):​​ Keeps recently used items near the
top of cache
■ Cache limit has been reached, items accessed less
recently are removed
○ Most Recently Used (MRU):​​ Removes most recently used
items first
■ Good for situations where older items are more likely to
be accessed
■ Types of cache
● Write-around cache:​​ Allows write operations to be written to storage,
skipping the cache altogether
○ Advantage → Keeps cache from becoming flooded when large
amounts of write I/O occur
○ Disadvantage→ Data not cached unless it is read from storage
■ Initial read operation will be comparatively slow because
the data has not yet been cached
● Write-through cache:​​ Writes data to both the cache and storage
○ Advantage→ Newly written data is always cached, thereby
allowing the data to be read quickly
○ Disadvantage→ Write operations not considered complete until
data is written to both cache and primary storage
■ Latency in write operations
● Write-back cache:​​ All write operations are directed to the cache
○ Difference from write-through→ Once data is cached, write
operation is considered complete
■ Data is later copied from the cache to storage
○ Advantage→ Low latency for both read and write operations
○ Disadvantage→ Data may be vulnerable to loss until it is
committed to storage
○ Crawler
■ Program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order
to create entries for a search engine index
 ● Also known as a "spider" or a "bot"
● Typically programmed to visit sites that have been submitted by their
owners as new or updated
● Entire sites or specific pages can be selectively visited and indexed
■ How it “crawls” around
● Starts with a list of URLs to visit (seeds)
○ Identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list
of URLs to visit (crawl frontier)
■ URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according
to a set of policies
○ Crawler performing archiving of websites copies and saves
information as it goes
■ Archives stored in such a way they can be viewed, read
and navigated as they were on the live web, but are
preserved as ‘snapshots’
■ Archives known as the repository
● Number of possible URLs crawled being generated by server-side
software has made it difficult for web crawlers to avoid retrieving
duplicate content
■ Behavior of web crawlers based on series of policies:
● Selection​​ policy: The pages to download
● Revisit​​ policy: When to check for changes to the pages
● Politeness​​ policy: How to avoid overloading Web sites
● Parallelization​​ policy: How to coordinate distributed web crawlers
■ Ex. Scooter→ Crawler for the AltaVista search engine and its Web site
● Adheres to rules of politeness for Web crawlers that are specified in the
Standard for Robot Exclusion (SRE)
● Asks each server which files should be excluded from being indexed
○ Doesn’t/Can’t go through firewalls
● Uses a special algorithm for waiting between successive server requests
so that it doesn't affect response time for other users
■ FUN FACT: Crawlers apparently gained the name because they crawl through a
site a page at a time, following the links to other pages on the site until all pages
have been read
○ Emulation
■ SOFTWARE CONTENT DEFINITION
● Use of an application program or device to imitate the behavior of
another program or device
○ Common uses:
■ Running an operating system on a hardware platform for
which it was not originally engineered
■ Running arcade or console-based games on desktop
computers
 ■ Running legacy applications on devices other than the
ones for which they were developed
■ Running application programs on different operating
systems other than those for which they were originally
written
● Ex. Many printers are designed to emulate Hewlett-Packard LaserJet
printers because so much software is written for HP printers
○ Any software written for a real HP printer will run in the non-HP
printer emulation and produce equivalent printing
■ SERVER VIRTUALIZATION DEFINITION: Synonym for virtual environment
● Also referred to as a partition, guest, instance or container
■ HARDWARE BASED DEFINITION:
● Use of hardware to imitate the function of another hardware device for
the purpose of connecting devices to one another or connecting to a
mainframe computer
■ STRUCTURE
● Divided into modules that correspond roughly to the emulated
computer's subsystems. Most often, an emulator will be composed of the
following modules:
○ CPU emulator or CPU simulator (unless the target being
emulated has the same CPU architecture as the host, in which
case a virtual machine layer may be used instead)
○ Memory subsystem module
○ Various input/output (I/O) device emulators
○ RAM (aka random access memory)
■ Type of memory that can be accessed randomly (any byte of memory can be
accessed without touching the preceding bytes)
● Computer can access memory faster because it doesn’t have to work
sequentially
○ Opposite of SAM (serial access memory) which stores data in a
series of memory cells that can only be accessed sequentially
● Unlike ROM or the hard drive, RAM is a ​volatile​​ memory and requires
power to keep the data accessible
○ If the computer is turned off, all data contained in RAM is lost
● The more RAM a device has, the faster it will perform
■ Main types of RAM
● DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory): Memory must be
constantly refreshed or it will lose its content
○ Typically used for the main memory in computing devices
○ Transistor and capacitor paired to create a memory cell, which
represents a single bit (as in the memory bit) of data
■ Capacitor holds to information (1 and 0)
 ■ Transistor acts as the switch that lets the control circuitry
on the memory chip read the capacitor or change its state
● SRAM (Static Random Access Memory): Doesn’t need to be refreshed
○ Typically used for cache
○ Faster than DRAM
○ Abandonware
■ A product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, and for
which no support is available
● Although such software is usually still under copyright, the owner may
not be tracking copyright violations
● Product usually abandoned and copyright and support issues are often
ignored when it’s:
○ No longer available for legal purchase
○ Over the age where the product creator feels an obligation to
continue to support it
○ Operating systems or hardware platforms have evolved to such a
degree that the creator feels continued support cannot be
financially justified
○ Used only with obsolete technologies, such as pre-Macintosh
Apple computers
■ POSSIBLE CONFUSION
● Difference between abandonware and a discontinued product→
manufacturer has not officially 'discontinued' the software, but only
ended their official efforts at technical support
■ Is downloading abandonware legal? → NO
● Copyrighted works that have been abandoned by their creators do not
automatically become public property
● However, since abandonware usually don’t have owners or they don’t
care, therefore, they won’t sue
● Abandonware websites often take advantage of international borders
○ Ex. Game created in Thailand while website based in Sweden
● Technically piracy, but no one really cares or take action so feel free
○ Digital dark age
■ Perception of a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to
read historical electronic documents and multimedia, because they have been
recorded in an obsolete and obscure file format
● Problem not limited to text documents, but applies equally to photos,
video, audio and other kinds of electronic documents
● Documents are stored on physical media which require special hardware
in order to be read
○ This hardware may not be available in a few decades from the
time the document was created
 ● Name derives from the term Dark Ages in the sense that there would be a
relative lack of written record, as documents are transferred to digital
formats and original copies lost
■ Examples
● NASA→ Early space records suffered more than once
○ For over a decade, magnetic tapes from the 1976 Viking Mars
landing were unprocessed
○ When later analyzed, the data was unreadable as it was in an
unknown format and the original programmers had either died or
left NASA
○ Images eventually extracted through months of puzzling through
data and examining how recording machines worked
● BBC Domesday Project→ Survey of the nation compiled 900 years after
the Domesday Book was published
○ Fears that the discs of the Domesday Project would become
unreadable as computers capable of reading the format and
drives capable of accessing the discs had become rare
○ The system was emulated in 2002 using a system called
DomesEm by the CAMiLEON project
■ Allows the information on the discs to be accessed on
modern computers
■ Possible causes of data loss in the future (aka digital dark age)
● File format too old to be opened in the future
● Special hardware unavailable
● In the case of magnetic tape data storage (used as backup for the
backup), because of evolving magnetic formats and a phenomenon
known as “bit rot”
○ Over time, the digital information on tape, and in other digital
formats, can decay or degrade if it is not stored properly or is
subjected to other adverse conditions
■ Solutions
● Save as PDF/A→ open standard based on Adobe Systems PDF format
○ Widely adopted by governments and archives around the world,
such as the United Kingdom
● Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument)
○ Can archive an editable document from office applications
○ Using open source software for working with digital content can
be used as a prevention measure
■ Since the software source code for reading and writing a
file format is open, the code can be used as a base for
future implementations
○ Obsolescence
 ■ State of being which occurs when an object, service, or practice is no longer
wanted even though it may still be in good working order
● Frequently occurs because a replacement has become available that has,
in sum, more advantages compared to the disadvantages incurred by
maintaining or repairing the original
● Typically preceded by a gradual decline in popularity
■ Types
● Technical/Technological obsolescence
○ When a technical product or service is no longer needed or
wanted even though it could still be in working order
■ Generally occurs when a new product has been created
to replace an older version
● Functional obsolescence
○ Reduction in usefulness or desirability of an object because of an
outdated design feature (one that can’t be easily changed)
○ Usually can no longer adequately perform the function for which
they were created
● Architectural obsolescence
○ Change in taste of buildings, old styles into modern styles
● Planned obsolescence
○ Purposefully implemented strategy that ensures the current
version of a given product will become out-of-date or useless
within a known time period
○ Guarantees that consumers will demand replacements in the
future, thus naturally supporting demand
○ Particularly seen in fashion and technology (ex. phones)
● Style obsolescence
■ OTHER STUFF: When a product or asset (such as lobby furnishings) is no
longer desirable to the owners because it has gone out of the popular fashion, its
style is considered to be obsolete
○ Link rot
■ Slang term for hypertext links that are broken
● Hyperlinks on websites or the Internet in general point to web pages,
servers or other resources that have become permanently unavailable
■ Created when a Web page is moved, taken down or reorganized
● Clicking on a rotten link usually results in a 404 error, which includes a
message that the page cannot be found
● Refers to pages that are unlikely to return to the linked address
○ Link rot that occurs due to website reorganization can be
corrected with redirects
○ Some link rot is inevitable as websites simply disappear
 ○
When there are deep links within a website, they may not
warrant the time and effort to create a redirect for a page that is
rarely visited
■ WAYS TO COMBAT
● Authoring
○ Make sure the URL you create is compact and direct, with no
unnecessary information
○ Avoid linking to PDFs as their content can change without
notice. Large PDFs may also download slowly and cause a
timeout error.
○ Avoid linking to pages deep in a website
● Server side
○ Never change URLs and never remove pages
○ Use resources to automatically fix links
○ Permalink (guarantees content won’t move)
○ Design good URLs that won’t change when software’s different
● User side
○ Toolbars help relink to new links when it’s been moved
○ Provide attempts to guess the link and go to the correct site
● Web archiving
○ Archive the URLs to preserve it for the future
■ Can be accessed for free from the Wayback machine
○ Vinyl
■ Analog sound storage medium with the form of a flat disc with an inscribed,
modulated spiral groove
● Primary medium used for music reproduction until late in the 20th
century
○ Co-existed with the phonograph cylinder from the late 1880s and
had effectively superseded it by around 1912
■ Has the potential to last for centuries
● May be scratched or warped if stored incorrectly or exposed to high heat
■ DESCRIBED BY
● Diameter in inches
● Rotational speed in revolutions per minute at which they are played
● Time capacity as determined by their diameter and speed
● Reproductive quality, or level of fidelity
● Number of audio channels (mono, stereo, quad, etc.
○ GeoCities
■ Was founded in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner
● First acquired by Yahoo in 1999
○ Was shut down 10 years later
■ Now only maintained in Japan
■ Website that organizes people’s history and what they’ve searched before
 ● “It was essentially an organization of like-minded user-created
homepages in different topical communities like sports, entertainment,
and tech.” (Mashable)
■ HOW IT WORKS
● Site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages
○ The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to
their content
■ Ex: Technology related stuff belonged in ​Silicon Valley
○ Timehop
■ Founded by Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong
● Has around 12 Million users
■ Created at Foursquare's Hackathon in February 2011
● Began as 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo
○ Original aim was to build the service that would replay the past
foursquare checkins in real-time
■ An application on smartphones that collects old photos and posts from Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter, and Dropbox photos and distributes the past
● Helps people remember the past and gathers their past in one cite which
makes it easier for them to find them
○ The Wayback Machine
■ Virtual Memory Lane created by Internet Archive in 2001
● Set up by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, and is maintained with
content from Alexa Internet
○ Enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time,
which the archive calls a "three dimensional index"
■ Provides a place to preserve digital artifacts for researchers, historians, etc
● Frequently used by journalists and citizens to review dead websites,
dated news reports or changes to website contents
○ Has been used to hold politicians accountable and expose
battlefield lies
● Can just as easily be used for entertainment to see what a page used to
look like
■ Has over 300 billion web pages
● From as far back as 1996
○ Allows people to look at websites that have been deleted
● Can manually archive any page you want so that you can always have
access to it in the future as long as it has crawlers
● Memory Development to Explore (Examples)
○ Restoring Active Memory
■ DEFINITION
● Program aims to mitigate the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in
military service members
 ○ Condition frequently results in an impaired ability to retrieve
memories formed prior to injury and a reduced capacity to form
or retain new memories following injury
■ Done through developing neurotechnologies to facilitate
memory formation and recall in the injured brain
● “Fun” Fact: Since 2000, 270,000 Service members have been diagnosed
with TBI
■ ARTICLE
● RAM program is developing and test a wireless, fully implantable neural
interface for human clinical use
○ Blends fundamental research and technology development
■ Exploring new methods for analyzing and decoding
neural signals to understand how targeted stimulation
might be applied to help restore function to the injured
brain
● Integrating the computational models into new,
implantable, closed-loop systems
● Volunteers living with deficit are taking part in human clinical studies to
help test and refine the RAM systems
○ Supports animal studies to understand the encoding and retrieval
of complex memories and memory attributes
■ Work aims to identify any characteristic neural and
behavioral correlates of memories facilitated by
therapeutic devices
● CASE STUDY: RAM REPLAY
○ Developing new closed-loop, non-invasive systems that leverage
the role of neural “replay” in the formation and recall of memory
■ Help individuals better remember specific episodic
events and learned skills
○ HDAC inhibition
■ DEFINITION
● HDAC is the abbreviation of histone deacetylases
○ Trigger DNA to wind more tightly around neighboring proteins,
ultimately dampening gene expression
● One of the key regulators of epigenetics
○ Can enhance learning in both normal mice and those that are
cognitively impaired
■ ARTICLE
● Scientists are trying to find a new way to selectively boost gene
expression in the brain
○ Hoping to treat psychiatric and neurological diseases
● Scientists have begun to recognize the importance of epigenetics
 ○ Molecular processes that change the expression of genes without
altering DNA–in the brain, and mostly in memory
● Recent studies have shown that existing drugs that prevent these HDAC
can increase the study in both normal mice and those that have
brain-damage
○ Giving an HDAC inhibitor to brain-damaged mice let them
recall their lost memory
■ EnVivo Pharmaceuticals is trying to produce HDAC
inhibitors better than the existing ones, which can easily
enter the brain
■ RESULT
● Developed a theory that certain triggers, such as exercise, visual
stimulation, or drugs, unwind DNA,
○ Therefore allowing expression of genes involved in neural
plasticity
● Scientists have solid evidence that HDAC inhibitors can boost memory
of mice or enable them to regain their lost memory
○ Done through rewriting or repairing damaged neural circuits
○ Optogenetics
■ DEFINITION
● Use of genetic engineering and optics to selectively monitor or control
nerve cell activity
■ ARTICLE
● Scientists managed to rewrite positive memories that drug addicted mice
have associated with cocaine
○ Make an alternation of the how the mice are attached to a
cocaine associated environment and change their associations to
become negative
■ Send substances to their brains and rewrite their
memories of their attachment
● RESULT: Mice no longer have a preference of cocaine associated
environments
○ Research from Oxford suggests that it may be the key to
addressing addiction at a neurological level
● Affirms that memories are stored as biophysical or biochemical changes
in the brain, caused by external stimuli
○ Neuroprosthetic implants
■ DEFINITION
● The idea that a patient with severe memory loss can get help from an
electronic implant
○ Will give people the ability to form long term memories
■ Silicon chips act like neurons
■ ARTICLE
 ● INVENTOR
○ Theodore Berger
■ Biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at the University
of Southern California in Los Angeles
○ Has spent much of the past 35 years trying to understand
fundamental questions about the behavior of neurons in the
hippocampus
■ Developed mathematical theorems that describe how
electrical signals move through the neurons of the
hippocampus to form a long-term memory
● Proved that his equations match reality
● WORK
○ Designed silicon chips to mimic the signal processing that those
neurons do when they’re functioning properly
■ Work that allows us to recall experiences and knowledge
for more than a minute
○ Neuroscientists track electrical signals in the brain by monitoring
action potentials, microvolt changes on the surfaces of neurons
■ Reports oversimplify what’s actually taking place
● RESULT
○ Thompson used a tone and a puff of air to condition rabbits to
blink their eyes, aiming to determine where the memory he
induced was stored
■ Were trying to find a specific place in the brain where
the learning was localized.
● Succeeded in stimulating the hippocampus of a
rabbit with electrical pulses
● Charted how signals move through different
populations of neurons
○ Hypothesize that cells fire in a way that forms patterns with
respect to time
■ Signals overlap, with some suppressing an incoming
pulse and some accentuating it
○ Creating false memories
■ ARTICLE
● Explains an experiment done by Steve Ramirez in 2012 at the MIT
laboratory
○ Identified, labeled and then reactivated a small cluster of cells
encoding a mouse’s fear memory
■ Provides strong evidence for the long-held theory that
memories are encoded in engram
● Placed the mouse in a small metal box with a black plastic floor
 ○ Mouse instantly froze in terror, recalling the experience of
receiving a foot shock in that same box
■ Reacting to a false memory planted in its brain
■ RESULT
● Not only was it possible to identify brain cells involved in the encoding
of a single memory
○ Specific cells could be manipulated to create a whole new
“memory” of an event that never happened.
● Work has launched a new era in memory research
○ Could someday lead to new treatments for medical and
psychiatric afflictions
■ E.g. depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and
Alzheimer’s disease
● Opens a deeper line of thought into human nature
○ If memories can be manipulated at will, what does it mean to
have a past?
■ Revolves around the idea that memory is identity
○ Rewriting existing memories
■ ARTICLE
● Jason Chan and Jessica LaPaglia study how easy it is to disrupt our
memories, and supplant what we think we know with misinformation
○ Showed volunteers the pilot episode of 24 and selectively
rewrote some of their memories of the show’s events
■ Told the volunteers false information right after they
actively remembered what they had
● E.g. some believed that an assassin knocked out
a flight attendant with a stun gun, when she
actually used a hypodermic syringe
■ RESULT
● New memories overwrite their old ones
○ Takes a while for the memory to become strengthened anew,
through a process called reconsolidation
■ If new information (and inaccurate ones) are fed before
reconsolidation, they can take over old ones
● Shows that despite what people believe, eyewitness testimony is often
seriously unreliable
○ Remembering something might cause memories to be erased or
manipulated
● Help with PTSD treatment ideas
○ Often assumed that helping people to put the past behind them
allows them to disconnect their experiences from negative
feelings
 ■ Chan and LaPaglia suggest that such techniques might
actually be exploiting the reconsolidation effect to
actually rewrite the past, rather than just severing our
connections from it.
● “Every time we bring back an old memory, ​we run the risk of changing
it​” - ​Robert Krulwich

Additional Questions and Cases

● Consider ​the power of first impressions​ as you plan your outfit for your next debate. Why are
they so impactful, and should they be? What does it take to change an impression?
○ First impressions are so impactful because
■ Are the first time a person judges another person
● What you think of that person is what you will think until further action
changes your mind
■ E.g. someone would give you the benefit of the doubt if your first impression was
that you were a responsible person (through looking neat and organized and
being respectful)
■ HALO EFFECT:
● Phenomenon whereby the perception of positive qualities in one thing or
part gives rise to the perception of similar qualities in related things or in
the whole
○ E.g. “You meet a friendly person at a party and later are asked to
solicit sponsors for a worthy cause. You contact that person
because you think she will make a contribution”
● May not work in long-lasting relationships
○ In reality there is no clear connection between being friendly and
being generous, but the halo effect leads you to think that
because he is good at socializing, he will be positive in another
category (being generous)
■ DEBATE EXAMPLE
● Your outfit gives a negative impression in a debate
○ Following the halo effect, the adjudicator might think negatively
of your debating skills
○ CHANGING A FIRST IMPRESSION:
■ Continued contact might change people's impression on you
● (Following above example) you absolutely dominate the debate so the
opposition might realize that “oh hey his debating skills don’t suck”
■ Einstein Example:
● When first looking at Einstein you might think “whoa this guy is crazy”
or some other negative thought
○ However since nowadays he is associated with being a genius,
that first impression is now gone
● Consider the case of ​highly superior autobiographical memory​, a condition in which people are
unable to forget even the most mundane details of their daily lives. Is the perspective in this
article too critical? Is it always better to have a better memory, or is it better to selectively (or
un-selectively) forget?
○ WHAT IS HSAM
■ Highly superior autobiographical memory
● Individuals are able to recall events from their personal past, including
the days and dates on which they occurred, with very high accuracy
○ Have a different neuroanatomy than normal people
■ TWO TYPES:
● Person who spends most of his/her time while recalling the past events
● One who possess an exceptional ability to evoke events relating to
his/her past
○ ARTICLE SUMMARY
■ CASE STUDY: ALEXANDRA
● “She says she sees what she saw that day, hears what she heard, and
emotionally feels what she felt at the time… It’s almost like time travel”
○ Con: can remember all the emotions and details and is
emotionally exhausted from it
○ Pro: ability to relive moments
● Certain memories that average people would push out of their minds are
ingrained in their minds forever
○ Con: Bad memories often haunt them
○ Pro: Learn from their mistakes and take measures to make sure
nothing similar happens again
● “If I didn’t have stuff to do all day, I could probably live in the past 24/7”
○ Ability to lose themselves in good memories/experiences
○ Allows them to escape from the present (pro and con)
■ CASE STUDY: Bill Brown
● “Everyone he has spoken to has struggled with depression”
● “Brown says it’s easier for him now, because over time, he’s learned
how to manage the memories, not to focus on the bad stuff, and instead
use his memory to entertain himself”
○ Although it is hard, it is possible to handle and control
■ NOTE: ARTICLE IS BIASED
● “She has dark hair and beautifully balanced features, but hasn’t really
dated and seems to have few of the preoccupations of most 22-year-olds.
She blames her memory for this”
○ Uses her appearance to support fact that she should be in a
relationship
■ Doesn’t mention personality
○ A more knowledgeable and educated source blaming her lack of
love on memory would be more trustworthy
 ○ ANSWER
■ Better to forget?
● Allow us to move on → increased emotional health
○ Ignore the embarrassing things we did in the past and let go
■ Not suffer due to who we were before
■ Better to selectively unforget?
● Increase productivity → remember more important things
○ Brain forgets old information to make room for new ones
■ Better to remember?
● Stops history from repeating itself → Learn from past mistakes and don’t
make them again by accident
○ “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat
it”
● Oxford professor Dr. Viktor Mayer-Schonberger argues that the Internet has made it more
difficult for us to leave behind memories—that “the digital realm remembers what is sometimes
better forgotten”. Read ​this review​ of his work and discuss with your team: how important is it
that we be able to erase our pasts? Is there an upside to memories being harder to forget?
○ ARTICLE SUMMARY
■ States that "Time is quite simply a very difficult dimension of human memory for
humans to master."
● Some banal detail might trigger an important memory so can be valuable
■ Argues that digital storage devices (cameras, mobiles, computers) should
automatically delete information that has reached its expiration date
● Google is now a world brain
○ Social media/technology literally can document everything,
including things we may not even know ourselves or have
already forgotten
■ Takes away the capacity to forget, which is extremely
valuable
■ PANOPTICON
● First envisaged in the 19th century by Jeremy Bentham
○ Is a prison in which guards could watch prisoners without them
knowing whether they were being watched
● 20th century → Michel Foucault
○ Argued that the model of the panopticon was used more
abstractly to exercise control over society
○ BENEFITS OF REMEMBERING
■ Act as a form of deterrence
● People will know what to do and what to not do
○ Not repeat past mistakes/the mistakes of others
■ Allow people to be more aware
● Know who people were in the past
○ Should always be wary of possibilities
 ■ “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”
● HOWEVER: can result in people not being able to forgive (as mentioned
later)
○ DETRIMENTS OF REMEMBERING
■ Limits one's decision-making ability and ability to form close links with people
who remember less
● Constantly scared of trying new things or repeating old actions that
resulted in negative emotions or things
■ Makes us forgive and trust less
● People always will remember who you were in the past
○ E.g. a criminal will always be known as a criminal no matter
how long its been since they committed the crime as mugshots
are now online and accessible to all
● On the other hand, some societies have chosen ​not to remember​. Consider the implications of a
damnatio memoriae. Are there some memories, personal or social, that are best forgotten?
○ ARTICLE SUMMARY
■ WHAT IS DAMNATIO MEMORIAE
● Ritual toppling and attacking of monuments
○ Typically have some power for millenia
■ Is the past told according to a particular narrative and
made tangible in order to influence collective memory
● Public removal of statues of leaders representing fallen regimes
○ Done to remind others to dishonor people who threatened the
stability of the state and sought to change the government,
usually for their own benefit
● Means condemnation of memory
○ Functioned as a political tool to subdue one’s enemies
■ Condemn the souls of their dead enemies to oblivion,
blocking them from an afterlife
○ Include the destruction of their family homes and death masks
and erasure of their images, names from histories, and
inscriptions
■ OTHER OPINIONS
● Opposers argue that statues should remain standing because they’re part
of our history and heritage
○ However they were mostly erected decades after the fall of the
Confederacy and made of flimsy materials, bought from factories
that specialized in budget-friendly “racist kitsch.”
■ EXAMPLES
● Ancient Egyptians wrote curses on red vases and then crushed, burned,
pierced, or buried them in order to kill a hated person’s spirit after the
death of their body
● Romans tried to defame people through the toppling of monuments
 ● Caligula in C.E 41
○ Statues were hastily tossed into the Tiber River in Rome, stuffed
away in warehouses, and recarved to look like other emperors
■ LESSON/FINAL WORDS
● Doing so is keeping with history
○ Relatively lenient punishment when considered against the sorts
of things that have been done to condemn the memory
● “Pulling down and beating monuments alone is not enough to snuff out
an ideology—but it’s a satisfying way to start.”
○ THINGS BEST REMEMBERED
■ Failures and successes
● Learn what to emulate and what to stay away from
■ Unhappy and happy times
● Allow us to appreciate what we have currently and know what to aim for
■ NOTE: basically everything has its value and honestly can be remembered
○ THINGS BEST FORGOTTEN
■ Small, irrelevant details
● Only clog up memory and are not important in the long run
● History depends on archives: records that allow us to tell the story of the past. How will future
generations tell the story of the 21st century if all our duck-face selfies vanished? What does its
archive look like? Compare the United States’ national museum (​Chapter 7​)’s digital journey to
perhaps the most well-known ​medium of digital ephemera​, Snapchat.
○ ARTICLE 1: CHAPTER 7’S DIGITAL JOURNEY
■ Smithsonian Museum (founded in 1846)
● Has been a pacesetter in adopting digital technology
○ Done to enhance the in-person visitor experience, engage and
involve the public,and extend the benefits of their scholarship
and collections to audiences not served today
● Recognizes the need to adopt an “one for all and all for one” attitude
○ Partnerships and collaborations will help serve the widest
possible audience
■ PROJECTS
● 1970 Museum of Natural History → digitize history specimens
● Smithsonian Art Museum → world’s first digital library of American art
● 2009 → Developed a pan institutional approach
○ Digitized 137 million objects and prioritized them
■ Plans include a “charter collection” in 3D
○ ARTICLE 2: SNAPCHAT
■ Snapchat casts off a quest for permanence, and archival desires
● Is less permanent than just continuing to look at something
○ Reminds us that sometimes making something fleeting is fine
■ Appeal seems to be that people don’t have to be too concerned about how they
take a photo
 ● Communication and socializing is more important
○ Creating a moment for another person specifically in most cases
■ Being free allows for more enjoyment
● Making something without having to worry about how making that thing
will potentially cast you in the eyes of history
● Watch ​this TED talk​ about memory manipulation by one of the world’s foremost psychologists,
and consider: how trustworthy is your memory? How much weight should memory hold for
determining facts?
○ SUMMARY OF SPEECH
■ STORY HE TELLS
● Man named Steve Titus was pulled over one day because car and
appearance were similar to that of a raper’s
○ When shown the pictures, the victim of rape said that he was the
closest
■ When testifying, she said that she was absolutely
positive he was the one and he was convicted
● 225 innocent people have been convicted due to faulty memories
■ LESSON HE TELLS
● “Memory works a little more like a Wikipedia page. You can go there
and change it, but so can other people.”
○ Doesn’t work like a recording device
● “Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing” and should not be treated like it
is a fact
■ EXPERIMENT DONE
● Simulated a car crash- asked some people how fast the cars were when
the car crash occurred
○ Variable- using the words “hit” vs “smash”
○ People that were asked with the word “smash” said the car was
going faster and also described broken glass
● Simulation of crash at spot with Stop sign
○ Asked questions insinuating existence of Yield sign
○ Many people said there had been a yield sign
● PSYCHOTHERAPY → Use of psychological methods, particularly
when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change and
overcome problems in desired ways
○ AS MENTIONED IN SPEECH: Implanting false memories
■ Woman believed that she had been forced into
pregnancy and that the baby had been cut out of her
belly though there were no physical scars
■ Implanted memories of getting lost in a mall →
succeeded on 25% of subjects
■ In Canada, study convinced 50% that they had been
attacked by a vicious animal
 ■ Implanted memory of getting sick from certain food →
subjects avoided food at picnics
○ ANSWER
■ Human memory is notoriously unreliable, especially when it comes to details
● Should not always be trusted completely, as it can be easily affected by
bias (e.g. rosy retrospection)
■ “Evidence” → Scientists have found that prompting an eyewitness to remember
more can generate details that are outright false but that feel just as correct to the
witness as actual memories
○ ADDITIONAL FOCUS: Elizabeth Loftus
■ Born October 16, 1944
● American cognitive psychologist and expert on human memory
○ Conducted extensive research on the malleability of human
memory
■ Best known for her groundbreaking work on the misinformation effect and
eyewitness memory
● Also known for the creation and nature of false memories
○ Including recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse
● Imagine that you were walking through a mall and happened to hear a song you loved as a child.
Music is extremely powerful as a summoner of ​past memories​ because of its emotional
connectivity. Are there any songs that would have such an effect on you? Can any other types of
stimuli (perhaps based on other senses) also elicit such vivid memories?
○ NEUROSCIENCE BEHIND MUSIC → MEMORY CONNECTIONS
■ Listening to music engages broad neural networks in the brain, including brain
regions responsible for motor actions, emotions, and creativity
● A piece of familiar music calls back memories of a particular person or
place
■ CASE STUDY: Amee Baird and Séverine Samson
● Used popular music to help severely brain-injured patients recall
personal memories
○ Research was published on December 10, 2013 in the journal
Neuropsychological Rehabilitation
○ POTENTIAL OTHER STIMULI: SMELL
■ Neurons in the nose are primary receptors
● Sense of smell is direct
■ Incoming smells are first processed by the olfactory bulb
● Implicated in hippocampus (memory) and also amygdala (emotion)
○ Why we get emotional and have memories when we smell things
■ Other senses such as vision and touch don’t go through
these parts of the brain
○ CASE STUDY: SYNESTHESIA
■ When stimulation of one sensory/cognitive pathway leads to automatic,
involuntary experiences in another
 ● Usually seems normal to the patient so is hard to detect
■ Often considered a “gift”
● No handicaps typically arise with the symptoms of synesthesia, so most
sufferers are okay with the fact that they have the disease
■ No one knows why it’s caused
● Most popular hypothesis → it develops during childhood when children
are intensively engaged with abstract concepts for the first time
● How different would we be—as people and as societies—if memory were not an active
reconstructive process?
○ WHAT IS RECONSTRUCTIVE MEMORY
■ The act of remembering that is influenced by various other cognitive processes
such as individual perceptions, social influences, and world knowledge, which
leads to potential distortion
● However, people still view memories as being a coherent and truthful
account of episodic memory and believe that their perspective is free
from error during recall
■ Eg. Gist Memory
● Fuzzy representations of a past event
● Beneficial to mankind from an evolutionary perspective
○ Helps people make decisions in terms of risk taking
■ Prevents them from looking at things objectively in a
black-and-white sense
○ An example of brains adapting to our surroundings
○ WHAT REMOVING IT COULD DO
■ Increase the reliability and trustworthiness of memory: make solving crimes and
other processes that may rely on memory simpler and more beneficial
● E.g. improving the reliability of witnesses in court
○ DIFFERENCE: LACK OF….
■ FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME
● Condition in which a person’s identity and relationships are affected by
faulty memories
○ “Obsession to a particular false memory, planted memory, or
indoctrinated memory can shape a person’s actions or even result
in delusional disorder”
● Many psychiatrists have accidentally planted false traumatic memories
○ Patients believe that the memories had been repressed
○ Retractors → patients who are victims of false memories being
planted in their brains
■ Some patients have brought these “repressed memories”
to court
■ MANDELA EFFECT
● Phenomenon in which a large number of people share false memories of
past events
 ○ Named as such because many had believed Nelson Mandela had
died in prison when he had been alive all along
● Due to reconstructed memory, large populations have believed things
that have turned out to be false
● Various media can be used to connect you with others in the future, or even to a future version of
yourself—from diaries and blogs to tombstones and eulogies. If you were to create them, what
would you include in them?
○ WHAT TO INCLUDE
■ Write down actual morals and important (stuff/things)
● Since many people say history repeats itself (and many don’t learn from
their mistakes) writing down important information could be important
○ Ex. Grandfather died a tragic death so a serious message
engraved on his tombstone might leave a lasting effect on his
family and prevent the same thing from happening
● Humans as a whole are becoming, as a whole, less smart so wise sayings
or proverbs could help us along as reminders
■ Any sort of information
● History is basically leaving stuff for later people to read so any sort of
information would be nice
○ Also just in case the future is worse than we are now, they will
have something to draw from
■ Kind words about the person
● To make their families feel better
○ Give them a better “last impression” especially to people who
didn’t know them as well
■ Our perspective
● Since the future will never be us, they will never feel what we feel
○ (Unless they are super technologically advanced)
● The future may lead completely different lives
○ Write down daily experiences, how we do things
● Our perspective could help broaden the future’s perspective
○ Fix any problems we can’t fix (hey hey global warming)
■ Ensure the future is smarter by letting them build on our
ideas and experiences and failures
○ QUICK REMINDER
■ Unless the future is worse than we are now, there is not anything of real
importance “the future” can’t figure out for themselves
○ PERSONAL RESPONSE
■ Well actually I don’t care for the future as long as I’m not there so I would
probably troll and write something on my tombstone like “Goodbye and come
again!” or “Make sure to make my grave nice and tidy” or something just to
make the atmosphere less gloomy and grave ⇐ get it cuz its a grave haha
● The word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek words for “home” and “pain”, meaning a painful
longing for home. In many cases, this home is imagined or idealized, representing a time and
place that never existed in the first place. Discuss with your team: is nostalgia healthy for
individuals? How about for cultures and societies? Then, consider ​this warning​ by novelist
Mohsin Hamid. Is it justified?
○ WHAT IS NOSTALGIA
■ Brings individuals back to the past
● Experience imagined memories
○ HOW HEALTHY IS NOSTALGIA
■ INDIVIDUALS → Is not necessarily healthy
● You’re stuck in the past thinking about something that could be
imaginary
● Every individual adds up to form a society
○ When everyone is stuck in the past, it can be pretty bad
■ CULTURES AND SOCIETIES → Seems pretty bad too
● Results in nobody moving forward
○ Everyone wants to stay in the past because life simply sucks now
■ Nothing advances forward because we don’t want to go
forward
● Causes all the political shenanigans that are going on
○ E.g. The Islamic State wants to revert itself to its glory days
○ E.g. Trump wants to “make America great again”, to return to
the imagined greatness of an America fresh off the back of
WWII
○ ARTICLE SUMMARY
■ Governments have a tendency to form projects of restoration
● Wanting to go back to the past (which is most likely more screwed up
than it is right now)
○ Leads to corruption and dissatisfaction
■ Nostalgia is increasingly common in society as we evolve
● Adaptive capacity is far greater, but experience change as stress
○ Growing terrified of the future as technology improves
● See upheaval and uncertainty ahead
○ Tools we have evolved to deal with upheaval and uncertainty,
and with the inevitability of our own mortality, are being
undermined
■ Storytelling is an antidote to nostalgia
● Have the power to liberate us from the tyranny of what was and is
○ By imagining, we create the potential for what might be
● Deep in the Amazon live the Piraha, a culture that does not venerate or remember its ancestors
and whose language, ​many linguists claim​, may have little or no way to talk about the future or
the past. What does such a culture look like without ancestral memory, or the ability to talk about
the past?
 ○ PEOPLE TO KNOW
■ Daniel Everett
● British ethnologist at the University of Manchester
○ Spent 7 years living with the Piraha starting from 1977
■ Benjamin Whorf
● Made a theory where people are only capable of constructing thoughts
for which they possess actual words
○ LANGUAGE ODDITIES
■ Has very little words associated with time
● Past tense verb conjugations don’t exist
■ Also has no subordinating conjunctions
● Instead of saying “When I have finished eating, I would like to speak
with you” they say “I finish eating, I speak with you”
○ A culture that has practically no history basically lives for NOW or the present
■ LIVING IN THE NOW THEORY
● Language is created by the culture
○ The core of their culture would be “Live here and now”
● AKA: What's worth communicating is what’s happening right now
○ All experience is anchored in the present
● Doesn’t allow abstract thought or complicated connections to the past
■ Supporting Evidence:
● No creation myth explaining existence
○ When asked they say “Everything is the same, things always are”
● Mothers don’t tell children fairy tales and nobody tells stories
● Nobody paints and there is no art
● Children are named after other members of the tribe that share similar
traits
● Whatever isn’t important in the present is quickly forgotten
○ Few can remember the name of all four grandparents
● Time capsules, such as the ​Crypt of Civilization​, can allow the past to “communicate” with the
future. What do the contents of time capsules tell us about how past generations wanted to be
remembered?
○ WHAT IS THE CRYPT OF CIVILIZATION
■ A 20′ x 10′ waterproofed room containing a menagerie of once-modern artifacts
and microfilm records
● Placed there by men and women in the years between 1937 and 1940
■ Located at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia, in Metro Atlanta
● Home to the International Time Capsule Society (ITCS)
○ Organization established in 1990 to promote the careful study
and documentation of time capsules
○ First successful attempt to bury a record of this culture for any future inhabitants or
visitors to the planet Earth
■ Designed for opening in the year 8113 AD
 ● Considered to be the halfway point to the future
○ 6,177 years had passed since the Egyptian calendar had been
established in 4241 B.C
■ Inspired by Egyptian Pyramids and Tomb Openings
○ THORNWELL JACOBS
■ “The father of the modern time capsule”
● Claims to be the first in modern times to conceive the idea of consciously
preserving man-made objects for posterity by placing them in a sealed
repository
■ Consulted with the U.S. Bureau of Standards
● Wanted to know best means of preserving the microfilm and artifacts for
such an enormous span of time
○ Opted to encase the sensitive items in sealed stainless steel
receptacles with glass linings
■ Described the crypt as the generation’s “archaeological duty”
● Featured in publications and radio broadcasts worldwide
○ CONTENTS..
■ Reflect on culture
● Pass down successes to be remember in a fond way (and not as a
destructive society)
■ Supposed to stop the scarcity of information on ancient civilizations
● Thought of the idea while teaching and researching ancient history
○ Conceived an idea to prevent the problem from occurring to
those who might study our civilization in the future
● Consider this article about how World War II is taught in different European countries (​Part 1​ |
Part 2​). How does education reshape our collective memory? Does the way you learn about
something significantly influence the way you remember it, and if so, what does that say about
our understanding of supposedly unchangeable historical events?
○ ARTICLE SUMMARY
■ Study that interviewed students from 7 european countries about how the history
of WWII is being taught
■ Austria: Was a victim of Nazism
● Blames the “small” amount of Austrian support on the evil propaganda
and pressure
○ War survivors often “forget” that their parents were either Nazis
or passive
● Uses WWII as a lesson to avoid extremism
■ England: Study of the Holocaust is compulsory
● Winston Churchill is described as a notorious leader
○ Described as a moral struggle where the UK persevered against
an abhorrent system
■ France: Teach students the duty to remember
 ● Use the Holocaust to teach universal principles of human rights and
notion of crimes
○ Ministry of Education tries to find ways to teach without
traumatising the students
■ Germany: Teach about the era of National Socialism
● Aim- “to educate students about the genocide and inhumane cruelties
that happened during the Hitler dictatorship and in this way prevent it
from happening again”
○ Teach in an authentic way- not afraid to face facts
● First generation that does not have a personal connection to the war
○ Examples- grandparents or relatives that could tell stories
■ Poland: Has a history program named 40 years after the war
● Created by communist governments that distorted the truth
○ Students study betrayal of Allies
■ Impression that France and the UK did not support them
when they were attacked
○ Through the perspective of Polish soldiers
■ Be proud of the Poles that fought the Germans
● Depict hopeless battles and heroic and idealistic
○ Example- Battle of Westerplatte- 180 Polish soldiers against
3500 Germans
■ Russia: Focus on Great Patriotic War
● Aka the final five years in which the USSR was directly involved
○ Majority of Russians don’t remember the date when WWII
started
● Lessons about WWII are connected to the families of the children
○ Encouraged to interview their relatives that were involved
● Gives credit to everyone
○ Blames Stalin for the weak army that made Russia easy for
Hitler to attack
○ Credits him for allowing free reign of talented people who
helped Russia win the war
■ Ukraine
● Consequence of a world economic crisis and the Germans breaking the
Versailles treaty
● Russian influence- Great Patriotic War heavily regarded
● Also highlights role of women
○ ALTERATION OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY
■ Easily done as memory is malleable
● Active reconstructive processes allow memory to be affected by biases,
false stories, etc
■ Officials (e,g. President) are typically held to be “royalty” or knowledgeable in
the citizen’s minds
 ● Their word can seem to always be accurate, and whatever they say is
often believed by people they rule over
■ NOTE: What everyone believes to be fact and history could very much be tainted
with bias due to how governments want to make their own country seem strong
or innocent
● Eg. Austrians believing that they had been victims and that their
ancestors had been innocent or pressured
○ CASE STUDY: Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
■ When someone stumbles upon an obscure fact and remembers it as such
● Note: basically an example of how the first time someone sees/is exposed
to something matters
● Why do we preserve notable historic artifacts and sites? Consider a monument or memorial
familiar to you. How does it connect to individual or collective memories?
○ Monuments and memorials help remind us of our history/past
■ IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY
● “A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural,
educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies- all of the
things that quite literally make us who we are.”
○ The past is what makes us who we are and is part of our identity
● “We learn from our past in order to achieve greater influence over our
future. History serves as a model not only of who and what we are to be,
we learn what to champion and what to avoid. Everyday decision-making
around the world is constantly based on what came before us.”
○ The past is an example of what to do and what not to do
■ Prevents repetition of mistakes
○ The destruction of historical sites and artifacts will “irreversibly set back global cultural
development and erase valuable parts of our world’s history”
■ “Archaeological discoveries let we as a species connect with our history: both
our recent and our ancient past.”
■ “Offer us a truly tangible means of contemplating where we came from.”
○ CONNECTIONS
■ Collective → people of the same race or culture will remember a specific event
different (e.g. with genocides and wars)
■ Individual → perhaps someone in one’s family was involved in an event, or they
simply formed a memory of such during their development