Memories

27 Jun 1996 22:58

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Memories can't wait

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

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

Recommended:
• Albert Lord, Singer of Tales [How oral epic poetry works. Singers do not actually memorize a fixed text, but learn conventions, cliches, formulas and general tricks, which allow them to spin out the basic story, in verse, in real time, with each performance. (Admittedly, some of the tricks, e.g. "catalogs," are ways of keeping the audience occupied while the singer thinks up the next patch of verse, so it's not quite real time.) This material is fascinating in its own right, and there seem to be intruiging connections with popular culture.]
• Ofshe and Watters, Making Monsters: False Memory, Satanic Cult Abuse, and Sexual Hysteria I have always found cranks and kooks and lunatics and the deluded morbidly fascinating, and up to a point I take a certain mean pleasure in seeing just how corrupt human thought can be; but beyond that point it's no fun any more, simply appalling and stunning. This book is full of people so far beyond that point that after reading it I feel like welcoming a garden-variety Shakespeare-wrote-Bacon man as a comrade in arms. Detailed, horses-mouth descriptions of how "therapists" create memories of abuse, the destruction of families and communities, people who sincerely confess to crimes they couldn't possibly have committed, medical, legal and scholarly incompetence, no complicity on an all-too-credible scale, sadistic "re-experiencings" of supposed abuse, the forcible creation of multiple personalities by supposed therapists, nonsensical conspiracies, and everywhere an abysmal absence of logic and reason and light. And we dare say the Dark Ages have ended!
• Daniel L. Schacter, Kenneth A. Norman, and Wilma Koutstaal, "The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory", Annual Review of Psychology 49 (1998): 289--318 [Review of the clinical and experimental evidence establishing the constructive nature of many kinds of memory. Horribly writeen but quite impeccable. ]

To read:
• Robert Baker, Hidden Memories
• Howard Eichenbaum, "Declarative Memory: Insights from Cognitive Neurobiology," Annual Review of Psychology, 48 (1997): 547--572
• Howard Eichenbaum and Neal J. Cohen, From Conditioning to Conscious Recollection: Memory Systems of the Brain
• J. D. E. Gabrieli , "Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Memory,"Annual Review of Psychology, 49 (1998): 87--115
• John Kotre, White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory [and what a dubious creation it is]
• Longnian Lin, Remus Osan, Shy Shoham, Wenjun Jin, Wenqi Zuo, and Joe Z. Tsien, "Identification of network-level coding units for real-time representation of episodic experiences in the hippocampus", PNAS 102 (2005): 6125--6130
• Elizabeth Loftus
  • Eyewitness Testimony
  • Myth of Repressed Memory
  • Witness for the defense
• Yasushi Miyashita, "Cognitive Memory: Cellular and Network Machineries and Their Top-Down Control", Science 306 (2004): 435--440
• Mark R. Rosenzweig, "Aspects of the Search for Neural Mechanisms of Memory" Annual Review of Psychology, 47 (1996): 1--32
• Bjorn H. Schott, Richard H. Henson, Alan Richardson-Klavehn, Christine Becker, Volker Thoma, Hans-Jochen Heinze and Emrah Duzel, "Redefining implicit and explicit memory: The functional neuroanatomy of priming, remebering, and control of retrieval", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (2005): 1257--1262
• Singer and Salovey, The Remembered Self
• Tom J. Wills, Colin Lever, Francesca Cacucci, Neil Burgess and John O'Keefe, "Attractor Dynamics in the Hippocampal Representation of the Local Environment", Science 308 (2005): 873--876