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knowledge from a scientific perspective of how human memory works can be instructive to historians.

Memory is much more than a simple retrieval system, as Dr. Schacter has demonstrated in his research. Rather, the nature of memory is constructive and influenced by a person’s current state as well as intervening emotions, beliefs, events and other factors since a recalled event.

Dr. Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His books include Searching for Memory: The Brain, The Mind, and The Past, and The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, both winners of the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award, and Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the Story of Memory. He also has written hundreds of articles on memory and related matters. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.

New research sheds light on spotting false memories of emotional events.

Have you heard people 'remember' things about the COVID-19 crisis that you know can't be right?

Or maybe you have a friend who keeps merging memories of social distancing guidelines?

The moments we remember from the first years of our lives are often our most treasured because we have carried them longest. The chances are, they are also completely made up.

Around four out of every 10 of us have fabricated our first memory, according to researchers. This is thought to be because our brains do not develop the ability to store autobiographical memories at least until we reach two years old.

Yet a surprising number of us have some flicker of memory from before that age

Most adults can’t remember much of what happened to them before age 3 or so. What happens to the memories formed in those earliest years?

When I talk about my first memory, what I really mean is my first retained memory. Carole Peterson, a professor of psychology at Memorial University Newfoundland, studies children’s memories. Her research has found that small children can recall events from when they were as young as 20 months old, but these memories typically fade by the time they’re between 4 and 7 years old.

“People used to think that the reason that we didn’t have early memories was because children didn’t have a memory system or they were unable to remember things, but it turns out that’s not the case,” Peterson said. “Children have a very good memory system. But whether or not something hangs around long-term depends on on several other factors.”

Special K for breakfast. Liverwurst and cheese for lunch. And I remember the song ‘You've Got Personality’ was playing as on the radio as I pulled up for work,” said Healy, one of 50 confirmed people in the United States with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, an uncanny ability to remember dates and events.

New research released this week has found that even people with phenomenal memory are susceptible to having “false memories,” suggesting that “memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune,” according to the authors of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Professor Elizabeth Loftus, who has spent decades researching how memories can become contaminated with people remembering—sometimes quite vividly and confidently—events that never happened. Loftus has found that memories can be planted in someone’s mind if they are exposed to misinformation after an event, or if they are asked suggestive questions about the past

psychologist Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California–Irvine, has made her name working on false memory. She tells Alison George how recollections can be conjured up,

Is it the power of suggestion from a therapist that creates these "memories," then? EL: Yes, a lot of the cases involve suggestive psychotherapy. But you don't absolutely need the therapy. You can get suggestion from the culture and the environment, like when somebody turns on Oprah and sees one of these repressed-memory therapists talking, then believes this has happened to them.

The memory of witnesses to crimes and accidents was a natural place to go. In particular I looked at what happens when people are questioned about their experiences. I would ultimately see those questions as a means by which the memories got contaminated.

how we all usually respond when our memory is challenged. We have an abstract understanding that people can remember the same event differently.

But when our own memories are challenged, we may neglect all this and instead respond emotionally, acting as though we must be right and everyone else must be wrong.

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.”

Eyewitness testimony has long been an important part of most judicial systems around the world. However, over the last three decades, psychologists have consistently proven how tenuous the memories truly are, and how easily they can be altered or even manufactured through the power of suggestion.

creating such faux memories in the brain, demonstrating that the manipulation of a specific subset of neurons in the mouse hippocampus can cause the animals to falsely remember a fear of a foot schock.

same optogenetic technique to essentially transfer a fear memory from one situation to another.

. As convincing as juries may find the testimony of witnesses, good prosecutors know that human memory is, more often than not, the least reliable source of evidence.

“We think parts of the brain used to actually perceive an object and to imagine an object overlap,” says Northwestern University scientist Kenneth Paller. “Thus, the vividly imagined event can leave a memory trace in the brain that’s very similar to that of an experienced event.”

How this process works is a research question of great interest to neuroscientists. This week, researchers affiliated with a project at MIT reported a giant step toward explaining how external stimuli can distort mental representations to produce brand new, seemingly accurate—but completely false—memories.

Why you may not be able to trust your own memories | The Independent

We rely on our memories not only for sharing stories with friends or learning from our past experiences, but also for crucial things like creating a sense of personal identity.

we’re often guilty of changing the facts and adding false details to our memories without even realising.

Dr. Tyson implied that President Bush was prejudiced against Islam in order to make a broader point about scientific awareness: Two-thirds of the named stars actually have Arabic names, given to them at a time when Muslims led the world in astronomy — and Mr. Bush might not have said what he did if he had known this fact.This is a powerful example of how our biases can blind us. But not in the way Dr. Tyson thought. Mr. Bush wasn’t blinded by religious bigotry. Instead, Dr. Tyson was fooled by his faith in the accuracy of his own memory.

When he was first asked for the source of Mr. Bush’s quotation, Dr. Tyson insisted, “I have explicit memory of those words being spoken by the president. I reacted on the spot, making note for possible later reference in my public discourse. Odd that nobody seems to be able to find the quote anywhere.” He then added, “One of our mantras in science is that the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.”

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.

are we losing the power to retain knowledge? The short answer is: No. Machines aren’t ruining our memory. Advertisement The longer answer: It’s much, much weirder than that!

we’ve begun to fit the machines into an age-old technique we evolved thousands of years ago—“transactive memory.” That’s the art of storing information in the people around us.

frankly, our brains have always been terrible at remembering details. We’re good at retaining the gist of the information we encounter. But the niggly, specific facts? Not so much.

Photographic memory, eidetic memory, Hyperthymesia, Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, perfect recall, there are a number of labels to choose from when discussing formidable memory prowess.

However, the idea that someone has a “flawless” memory, is able to remember everything from any aspect of their lives in great and accurate detail, is far from confirmed by available scientific evidence.

when you ask more personal life events that things get tricky. If someone describes the scene at their 7th birthday and what presents they got, how you are supposed to confirm if they’re remembering it correctly?

A Bachelor’s degree taught me how to learn to ace exams. But it didn’t teach me how to learn to remember.

65% to 80% of students answered “no” to the question “Do you study the way you do because somebody taught you to study that way?”

the most-popular Coursera course of all time: Dr. Barabara Oakley’s free course on “Learning how to Learn.” So did I. And while this course taught me about chunking, recalling, and interleaving

. The purpose of this review article is to summarize recent researches focusing on phantom limb in order to discuss its definition, mechanisms, and treatments.

The incidence of phantom limb pain has varied from 2% in earlier records to higher rates today. Initially, patients were less likely to mention pain symptoms than today which is a potential explanation for the discrepancy in incidence rates. However, Sherman et al.4 discuss that only 17% phantom limb complaints were initiated treated by physicians. Consequently, it is important to determine what constitutes phantom pain in order to provide efficacious care. Phantom pain is pain sensation to a limb, organ or other tissue after amputation and/or nerve injury.5 In podiatry, the predominant cause of phantom limb pain is after limb amputation due to diseased state presenting with an unsalvageable limb. Postoperative pain sensations from stump neuroma pain, prosthesis, fibrosis, and residual local tissue inflammation can be similar to phantom limb pain (PLP). Patients with PLP complain of various sensations including burning, stinging, aching, and piercing pain with changing warmth and cold sensation to the amputated area which waxes and wanes.6 Onset of symptoms may be elicited by environmental, emotional, or physical changes.

The human body encompasses various neurologic mechanisms allowing reception, transport, recognition, and response to numerous stimuli. Pain, temperature, crude touch, and pressure sensory information are carried to the central nervous system via the anterolateral system, with pain & temperature information transfer via lateral spinothalamic tracts to the parietal lobe. In detail, pain sensation from the lower extremity is transported from a peripheral receptor to a first degree pseudounipolar neurons in the dorsal root ganglion and decussate and ascend to the third-degree neurons within the thalamus.7 This sensory information will finally arrive at the primary sensory cortex in the postcentral gyrus of the parietal lobe which houses the sensory homunculus.8 It is unsurprising that with an amputation that such an intricate highway of information transport to and from the periphery may have the potential for problematic neurologic developments.

According to the Innocence Project, one in four people who have been exonerated for crimes they didn't commit confessed to that crime.

Psychologists have documented several reasons this might occur. The big one is that interrogating police officers can impose their suggestions on suspects: "We have evidence proving you were there!" "Your fingerprints were found!"

Only about 18 percent of the well-rested participants signed the form (such is the baseline power of an authority figure demanding guilt). But the results were more dramatic in the sleep-deprived condition. "That 18 percent now has risen to 50 percent," Loftus says.

In interviews across three German states, historians, activists, officials and ordinary citizens explained their support for monuments glorifying a former enemy and occupier as a mixture of bureaucratic drift, aversion to change and a rock-solid commitment to honoring the victims of Nazi aggression that trumps any shifts in global affairs.

“We were taught to learn from pain,” said Teresa Schneidewind, 33, the head of Lützen’s museum. “We care for our memorials, because they allow us to learn from the mistakes of past generations.”

Germany’s top court ruled just last year against the removal of a medieval, antisemitic sculpture in the very church where Martin Luther had preached. Despite debates, some swastikas from the Third Reich have been left on church bells.

During the Nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by a perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion. We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach us. Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.

the twentieth century that we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nostalgo-triumphalist—praising famous men and celebrating famous victories—or else, and increasingly, they are opportunities for the recollection of selective suffering.

The problem with this lapidary representation of the last century as a uniquely horrible time from which we have now, thankfully, emerged is not the description—it was in many ways a truly awful era, an age of brutality and mass suffering perhaps unequaled in the historical record. The problem is the message: that all of that is now behind us, that its meaning is clear, and that we may now advance—unencumbered by past errors—into a different and better era.