Azhea Wright

PIN 183

Professor Wellerstein

Research Proposal

Sound Therapy Memory Reconstruction and false Memory Implementation

The eyes are not cameras and they don’t store what they see in arrays of pixels like a computer does.
The ears are not voice recorders. They capture sound fragments, but they don’t store an uninterrupted
wave diagram of what we hear. The fingers aren’t sensor arrays. They capture sequences of activations
levels, but they don’t record them in a time stream.

When we store sensory information, different amounts and types of stimulation are stored, depending
on our emotional state and learning motivation. The brain tries to store stuff as small knockoffs of things
that are already stored, in order to minimize new storage.

The problem is how to continue to fool ourselves into believing that we remember fully when the
memories are really just sketches. The answer is reconstruction.

Memories stored from vision are really the highlights. The activity of visual perception is a sequence of
explorations of what is available. The explorations consist of rapid eye movements orchestrated by both
hemispheres in an attempt to understand what we are seeing. It is the results of the movements that
are stored in memory, not the entire visual field, and likely not all of the movements even.

Remembering consists of telling a story about the highlights. The highlights are used to reconstruct the
parts of the visual field they represent, and the rest is filled in with a best guess. We are really good at
guessing what we can’t see, and this has been well characterized by studies of the blind spot in our eyes.

This is where sound therapy comes into play. The auditory system is responsible for 85% brain activity.
High frequency sound, such as that used in the Sound Therapy programs, is the most effective sensory
input to achieve this stimulation because sound registers at all three levels of the brain: the brain stem,
the emotional mid brain, and the cerebral cortex. Sound Therapy causes neural firing in complex
patterns which engage many different sensory and perceptive areas such as the auditory cortex,
hypothalamus, and limbic system. This causes a memory to come back or become clearer.

The problem with this is memory is certainly not perfect. There is such thing as false memory
implementation where people can mix up imagination with memory. If someone is told something
happened to them enough times they will start to believe it. Each time you tell a story, you change the
memory, maybe dropping in new details, weaving in tidbits you really heard from somebody else, or
forging new, and possibly inaccurate or misleading, connections. When combining false memory
implementation with sound therapy someone can really be convinced of memories that do not exist.