Extending Reading: "It's Magical it's malleable, it's memory."

1. What is the relationship between memory and selfhood?

Memory is our ability to retain knowledge of past events. And selfhood is individuality or our uniqueness. “Memory is bedrock of the self,” from the statement memory represent experience and it is the factor that shape who we are which made us unique from others. Memories from the past shape how we think and our behaviors. Example in the article shows that we could also create our own memory by listening others. In the article a girl been told that she is the one who saw her mom die. After that she make up stories in her head about her mother death, but early one morning her brother told that she is not the one who saw her mother death but it is the other girl. This show that we could make up memory and memories could reflect our self.

2. What new discovery about memory do you find most interesting?

The new discovery about memory I find most interesting is “memory is not a single entity residing in a single place.” I found it most interesting because we got tons of memories and our brain got no limit memory space. Even though we have forgotten some information but sometime it came back suddenly, so this shows that memory is not erased from our brain. Also the brain has a parallel processing in order to associate the memory with the person emotions.

3. What is the homunculus crisis?

In order for the brain to recall the information, many neuron are activated and neuron themselves are specialized for different types of memory. Homunculus crisis is a mystery that no one knows what triggers the neurons in our brain. And it leads to question such as “Who is thinking? Is memory remembering us?”

4. Which theory of dreams finds support in the experiments by Lynch?

Lynch’s experiment supports the biological dream theories of Hobson and Vertes. Lynch proves that rat memories improve during it sleep and the brain send particular impulse called theta waves. Vertes’s says that we dream to prevent our body from going into coma state. And Hobson’s says that our brain randomly send neural impulse which causes us to have random dreams.

5. How can some memories become indelible?

Some memories become indelible because during the encoding process that person got powerful emotions or during stress. During stress the stress hormone stimulates the heart and makes it pump faster and the muscle began to tense and this has effect on the neurons. And for powerful emotions, example we faced and very dangerous situation and scared us, this memory will be recorded in our brain and used it to be a knowledge incase of facing the same situation next time.

6. How can amnesia and repression be explained?

Repression is when we forgot something and later on it got retrieve. And amnesia is a loss of memory. Amnesia often occurs in an injury and repression believes to be involved in traumatic experience. Both repression and amnesia believe to be causes by the malfunction of the hippocampus, when hippocampus depicting words and pictures into our explicit memory.

7. Explain the following statement: "Memory is more reconstructive than reproductive."

Memory got lost through time, but we build our memory anytime. Memory could not be reconstructive because we seem to and new memory when times passes and the old memory will be changed in its detail. But memory could be reconstructive because we often made up our own memories such as the example of the number one answers.

8. What new paradigm of memory is now emerging?

The new paradigm of memory is now emerging memory is how our memory mixes with our emotions. It both contain true and false situation. And this memories will shape us of who be are.

9. After reading this article, what conclusions can you make about memory?

For me memory is one of the most important things in human life and it is also one of the most complex things and hard to explain. Many scientist studies about it but still they can’t found out who or what bring our memory back. After reading this memory article it made me learn many new things about our brain and ourselves, such as how we memorize things and why some people have difficulty memorizing.

Demonstration 4: Memory is often a reconstruction

In the demonstration we again do the memory test, but this time we memorize shapes and drawings. This is how the activity goes:

- First, Dr. Anthony shows each drawing about 5 seconds.

- Then he let us close the eyes for around 2 minutes, imagining the pictures.

- Next, he gave us the sheet of paper with words on it.

- And draw the pictures.

The independent variable of this activity is on the sheet that Dr. Anthony given out has different set of words. And the hypothesis is set of words given will influence the outcome of the picture drawn by the participant.

The technique I used to remember all the shape is connect the pictures with the object we know. And my result came out to be 100% correct.

The Rumor Chair Activity

Today activity we done in class is The Rumor Chair Activity. In the activity we ask for four volunteers. First, let three of the volunteer wait outside and one stay and listen to the story. When the whole story is told let the first volunteer who listens to the story already told it to the second volunteer by memories and so on.

Leveling: simplifying material

- The story condenses.

- Some details got cut out.

- Such as information on revolution.

Sharpening: highlighting or overemphasizing some material

- Some information could be told until the last person.

- Such as pilot throwing microphone at the terrorist.

Assimilation: changing details to better pit the subjects own background or knowledge (schemas)

- Some information has been changes according to the story teller.

- Such as word hijacker changed to terrorist.

Demonstration 3: Meaning Enhances Recall

In the third demonstration Dr. Anthony show the student a card with word on it and each card will have letter A or B at the bottom left of the card. And after every card is shown he wants us to write it down on a piece of paper by memorization. If the card have letter A on it he want us to tell the syllables and if it shows letter B he want us to tell whether the word is pleasant or unpleasant.
The hypothesis of this experiment is the student could remember words with letter B more than letter A on the card. My result is I could remember 14 words with 5 words that got letter A on the card and 9 words with letter B on the card. And the result for the class is bimodal, which means that there are to modes, which are 15 and 10 words. And the mean would be around 15 to 16 words. For the result of letter A and B, 3 student could recall words with letter A more than B, 4 student got same results, and 9 recall words with letter B more that A. This shows that the hypothesis is correct.

Discovery of Psychology: Memory

Today in AP Psychology class we watch Discovery of Psychology about Memory. Even though the video color came out to be black and white and it is unattractive, but I tried to listen attentively. The things I learnt from the video today are about short term, long term memory and how specific parts of brain are important in memorization. For short term memories, strategies that will increase in our ability to remember are chunking or mnemonics. But these strategies can help on some stances only because remember is also up to who you are, what we knew, level of our concentrations, and the distractions when new information is encoding. For long term memory in order for the brain to put the information into long term memory it have to enter the short term memory section first. When the memory got stored in the short term memory section it will get pass on to the long term memory section or maybe we will forget it soon because short term memory will store only small amount of information. Example of long term memory could be an unlimited tape that could record and play it when ever we wanted. Lastly about how important the brain tissues are in memorization. In the video they show that a mouse could remember the maze easily but when some part of the brain tissues got took of they can’t remember the maze and found it difficult to memorize it.

Immediate Memory Span 2

The second activity for Demonstration Short Term Memory is to memorize the most words that Dr. Anthony read out. Dr. Anthony read out fourteen words and he let the student wrote it down in any order. The result shows that most students could remember more at the early and the late list of words this is called the position effect. There are also some words in the middle that many students could recall such as pineapple and night. Many students recall pineapple because is distinctiveness which is sounds weird and different and for the word night it is the repeat words. The average scores came out to be seven which is equal to the first activity.

Immediate Memory Span

Today activity is Demonstration Short Term Memory. In this activity Dr. Anthony read out list of numbers and let the student wrote them down. First level contain three digits, second level contain four digits and so on. On the activity I went to the fifth level which contain seven digits and missed to next one. The best strategy to memorize the numbers for this activity is to using chunking, chunking is to remember things is groups such as phone numbers. Another strategy is to let each number represent something that is easy to memorize and make up the story of the things we have to remember.

My First Memory

When I was five years old, studying at Saint John. My father got a new mobile phone and he gave me his number. One day in the class my room mates is exchanging phone numbers and I gave them my father’s numbers without knowing it was my father mobile number until I was around 10.

When everyone posted their first memory onto their blog, Dr. Anthony let everyone share their memories. After writing it all down on the board he let us analysis which memory is negative, positive and neutral. The result came out that neutral is the least and positive and negative is around the same amount. This shows that most people remember the highest point or the lowest point of their life. And from the ages shown on the board shows that people can remember when they are five years old and onward but before five years old memories are memories that been told by others.