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Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Why Factor, Memory - 0 views

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    "Memory plays a big part in shaping our identity, but can we rely on what we recall about ourselves and about others? Mike Williams finds out how human memory works and why some memories flood back more easily than others. He also explores whether different senses trigger different types of memories. Mike speaks to memory experts Martin Conway, Elizabeth Loftus, Gisli Gudjonsson, Maria Larsson and Simon Chu. The reader is Roberto Pistolesi."
markfrankel18

Elizabeth Loftus: The fiction of memory | Video on TED.com - 0 views

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    "Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It's more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics, and raises some important ethical questions we should all remember to consider. Memory-manipulation expert Elizabeth Loftus explains how our memories might not be what they seem -- and how implanted memories can have real-life repercussions."
Lawrence Hrubes

How do you memorise an entire symphony? - BBC News - 0 views

  • Memorised music performance has interested scientists since as far back as the 1800s. One type of memory that musicians use is commonly called "muscle memory", but the memories are not actually stored in the muscles. Muscle memory instead refers to a type of "procedural" memory called motor learning, in which memories for movement patterns are acquired through repetition. Procedural memory is separate from other types of memory, such as our memory for events (autobiographical memory) or general knowledge about the world (semantic memory).
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Our Memory Fails Us - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Overconfidence in memory could emerge from our daily experience: We recall events easily and often, at least if they are important to us, but only rarely do we find our memories contradicted by evidence, much less take the initiative to check if they are right. We then rely on confidence as a signal of accuracy — in ourselves and in others. It’s no accident that Oprah Winfrey’s latest best seller is called “What I Know For Sure,” rather than “Some Things That Might Be True.”Continue reading the main story Our lack of appreciation for the fallibility of our own memories can lead to much bigger problems than a misattributed quote. Memory failures that resemble Dr. Tyson’s mash-up of distinct experiences have led to false convictions, and even death sentences. Whose memories we believe and whose we disbelieve influence how we interpret controversial public events, as demonstrated most recently by the events in Ferguson, Mo.Erroneous witness recollections have become so concerning that the National Academy of Sciences convened an expert panel to review the state of research on the topic. This fall the panel (which one of us, Daniel Simons, served on) released a comprehensive report that recommended procedures to minimize the chances of false memory and mistaken identification, including videotaping police lineups and improving jury instructions.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Brain That Couldn't Remember - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In that pantheon of illuminatingly broken men and women, Henry stands apart. It is difficult to exaggerate the impact he has had on our understanding of ourselves. Before Brenda Milner collaborated on that first paper about Henry, the prevailing theory of memory held that its functions could not be localized to a single cortical area, that learning was distributed across the brain as a whole. By that theory — built upon the experimental lesioning of the brains of rats — a person’s memory would be affected only in proportion to the amount of brain tissue removed, regardless of which brain structures the tissue was removed from. Milner’s first paper about Henry, along with her previous work, upended this view.
  • Five years after Milner’s first paper about Henry, she published a second that was almost as revelatory. That paper documented Henry’s gradual improvement over a three-day period on a difficult hand-eye coordination task. His improvement came despite his inability to ever remember his previous attempts at the task, indicating that there are at least two different memory systems in the brain — one responsible for our conscious, episodic memories, the second responsible for task-or-skill related “procedural” memories — and that these two systems seem to rely on entirely distinct parts of the brain. This was another fundamental step forward in our understanding of how memory works. Together, Milner’s two Henry-­related revelations can be viewed as the cornerstones of modern memory science.
  • Corkin: Yeah, but it’s not peer-­reviewed, for one thing. That’s important. The stuff that’s published is good stuff. Peer-­reviewed. You can believe it. Things that, you know, experiments that might not have been good experiments, there might have been inadequate control groups. ... There are all sorts of things that can go wrong with experiments. Not every experiment is publishable.
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  • Me: But they can still be interpreted by other people. ... Maybe as we continue to understand how the brain works, and how memory works, some of this existing data of H.M.’s could be reilluminated by new theories, by new ideas, by new — it just seems a shame to destroy it. And it also seems — and this would be the darker interpretation of it — it locks in stone your own telling of H.M.’s story.
Lawrence Hrubes

Henry Gustave Molaison: The Basis for 'Memento' and the World's Most Celebrated Amnesia... - 0 views

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    "Scoville later called the operation "a tragic mistake" and warned neurosurgeons never to repeat it, but neuroscience and cognitive psychology benefitted hugely. The operation could not have been better designed if the intent had been to create a new kind of experimental object that showed where in the brain memory lived: there was no other way that Molaison's brain injuries could have occurred, and no other way that the precision of his memory damage could have been brought about. Molaison gave scientists a way to map cognitive functions onto brain structures. It became possible to subdivide memory into different types and to locate their cerebral Zip Codes."
markfrankel18

These are the memories you're most likely to get wrong - Quartz - 0 views

  • Cross-cultural studies of flashbulb memories show that although the types of events and the memories that result are quite similar from person to person, the specific events that lead to these memories vary dramatically.
markfrankel18

The Problem With History Classes - Atlantic Mobile - 1 views

  • Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same. Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses. And rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.
  • History may be an attempt to memorialize and preserve the past, but it is not memory; memories can serve as primary sources, but they do not stand alone as history. A history is essentially a collection of memories, analyzed and reduced into meaningful conclusions—but that collection depends on the memories chosen.
  • Although, as Urist notes, the AP course is "designed to teach students to think like historians," my own experience in that class suggests that it fails to achieve that goal. The course’s framework has always served as an outline of important concepts aiming to allow educators flexibility in how to teach; it makes no reference to historiographical conflicts. Historiography was an epiphany for me because I had never before come face-to-face with how historians think and reason—how they construct an argument, what sources animate that approach, and how their position responds to other historians. When I took AP U.S. History, I jumbled these diverse histories into one indistinct narrative. Although the test involved open-ended essay questions, I was taught that graders were looking for a firm thesis—forcing students to adopt a side. The AP test also, unsurprisingly, rewards students who cite a wealth of supporting details. By the time I took the test in 2009, I was a master at "checking boxes," weighing political factors equally against those involving socioeconomics and ensuring that previously neglected populations like women and ethnic minorities received their due. I did not know that I was pulling ideas from different historiographical traditions. I still subscribed to the idea of a prevailing national narrative and served as an unwitting sponsor of synthesis, oblivious to the academic battles that made such synthesis impossible.  
Andrea Barlien

What happens in your brain when you make a memory? | Education | The Guardian - 0 views

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    You might imagine memory is a Santa's sack of life events and the first half of jokes. You would be wrong. Neuroscientist Dean Burnett explains all in our new series, Use your head
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    You might imagine memory is a Santa's sack of life events and the first half of jokes. You would be wrong. Neuroscientist Dean Burnett explains all in our new series, Use your head
markfrankel18

Colonoscopies Clarify Inner Workings of Minds | Big Think - 0 views

  • Memories, and understandings, are story shaped. To remember or make sense of a thing is to have a story about it. Tales of colonoscopies and cathartic errors can probe the inner workings of our minds.
  • . We must reconcile: Steven Pinker’s “to a very great extent our memories are ourselves,” with Kahneman’s “I am my remembering self and the experiencing self who does my living is like a stranger to me,” and Oliver Sacks’ observation that there is “no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth” of memories. Our minds are story processors (not logic processors, or movie cameras). By all means get better stories. But don’t tell yourself the tall tale that you can do without them.
Lawrence Hrubes

How the Brain Stores Trivial Memories, Just in Case - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The surge of emotion that makes memories of embarrassment, triumph and disappointment so vivid can also reach back in time, strengthening recall of seemingly mundane things that happened just beforehand and that, in retrospect, are relevant, a new study has found.The report, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that the television detective’s standard query — “Do you remember any unusual behavior in the days before the murder?” — is based on solid brain science, at least in some circumstances.The findings fit into the predominant theory of memory: that it is an adaptive process, continually updating itself according to what knowledge may be important in the future.The new study suggests that human memory has, in effect, a just-in-case file, keeping seemingly trivial sights, sounds and observations in cold storage for a time in case they become useful later on.
feliepdissenha

BBC News - Why good memories are less likely to fade - 0 views

  • It was 80 years ago that the idea of negative memories fading faster was first proposed. Back in the 1930s psychologists collected recollections about life events like people's holidays - marking them as pleasant or unpleasant. Weeks later an unannounced request came from the researchers to recall their memories. Of the unpleasant experiences nearly 60% were forgotten - but only 42% of the pleasant memories had faded.
  • In all, 2,400 autobiographical memories were included, from 562 individuals in 10 countries.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Mystery of S., the Man with an Impossible Memory | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • The researcher who met with S. that day was twenty-seven-year-old Alexander Luria, whose fame as a founder of neuropsychology still lay before him. Luria began reeling off lists of random numbers and words and asking S. to repeat them, which he did, in ever-lengthening series. Even more remarkably, when Luria retested S. more than fifteen years later, he found those numbers and words still preserved in S.’s memory. “I simply had to admit that the capacity of his memory had no distinct limits,” Luria writes in his famous case study of S., “The Mind of a Mnemonist,” published in 1968 in both Russian and English.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - How to learn like a memory champion - 1 views

  • As Cooke first set out developing his idea, he turned to his former classmate at Oxford University, Princeton neuroscientist Greg Detre, to help update his tried-and-tested techniques with the latest understanding of memory. Together, they came up with some basic principles that would guide Memrise’s progress over the following years. The first is the idea of “elaborative” learning – in which you try to give extra meaning to a fact to try to get it to stick in the mind. These “mems”, as the team call them, are particularly effective if they tickle the funny bone as well as the synapses – and so for each fact that you want to learn, you are encouraged to find an amusing image or phrase that helps plant the memory in your mind.
  • Unsurprisingly, it was the friendly competition element that captured the attention of Traynor's primary school pupils learning Spanish. “As soon as they come into the classroom, they want to see where they are on the leader board,” he says. And there are other advantages. Each lesson, Traynor tends to split the class into two – while half are doing the “spade work” on vocabulary learning on the school's iPads, he can teach the others – before the two halves switch over. By working with these smaller groups, he can then give more individual attention to each child's understanding of the grammar.Even more powerfully, Traynor recently began encouraging his class to record and upload their pronunciation of the words onto the app – which they can then share with their classmates using the course. The sound of their classmates seems to have spurred on their enthusiasm, says Traynor. “They're constantly trying to work out whose voice they're hearing,” he says. “So they're giving more attention to the different sounds. I think it's improved their speaking and listening dramatically.”Although most courses on Memrise deal with foreign languages, teachers in other subjects are also starting to bring the technology to their classroom. Simon Birch from The Broxbourne School in Hertfordshire, for instance, uses it to teach the advanced terminology needed for food technology exams, while his school’s English department are using it to drill spelling. "The benefits for literacy can't be overstated," Birch says.
markfrankel18

How Many of Your Memories Are Fake? - Erika Hayasaki - The Atlantic - 2 views

  • When people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory—those who can remember what they ate for breakfast on a specific day 10 years ago—are tested for accuracy, researchers find what goes into false memories.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Sleep's memory role discovered - 0 views

  • The mechanism by which a good night's sleep improves learning and memory has been discovered by scientists. The team in China and the US used advanced microscopy to witness new connections between brain cells - synapses - forming during sleep. Their study, published in the journal Science, showed even intense training could not make up for lost sleep. Experts said it was an elegant and significant study, which uncovered the mechanisms of memory. It is well known that sleep plays an important role in memory and learning. But what actually happens inside the brain has been a source of considerable debate.
markfrankel18

Witness Accounts in Midtown Hammer Attack Show the Power of False Memory - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • There is no evidence that the mistaken accounts of either person were malicious or intentionally false. Studies of memories of traumatic events consistently show how common it is for errors to creep into confidently recalled accounts, according to cognitive psychologists.“It’s pretty normal,” said Deryn Strange, an associate psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “That’s the hard thing to get our heads around. It’s frightening how easy it is to build in a false memory.”
markfrankel18

What the oral histories of Russian Jews reveal about memory | Aeon Essays - 0 views

  • Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union tell inconsistent stories. What does this say about the nature of memory?
markfrankel18

Why Time Slows Down When We're Afraid, Speeds Up as We Age, and Gets Warped on Vacation... - 0 views

  • As we grow older, we tend to feel like the previous decade elapsed more rapidly, while the earlier decades of our lives seem to have lasted longer. Similarly, we tend to think of events that took place in the past 10 years as having happened more recently than they actually did
  • The most straightforward explanation for it is called the clarity of memory hypothesis, proposed by the psychologist Norman Bradburn in 1987. This is the simple idea that because we know that memories fade over time, we use the clarity of a memory as a guide to its recency. So if a memory seems unclear we assume it happened longer ago.
  • It is clear that however the brain counts time, it has a system that is very flexible. It takes account of [factors like] emotions, absorption, expectations, the demands of a task and even the temperature .The precise sense we are using also makes a difference; an auditory event appears longer than a visual one.
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