Why We Remember So Many Things Wrong - The New Yorker - 1 views
www.newyorker.com/...a-happened-memory-recollection
memory psychology brain EMOTIONAL-MEMORY hippocampus
shared by simoneveale on 31 May 16
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Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate.
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Neisser became fascinated by the concept of flashbulb memories—the times when a shocking, emotional event seems to leave a particularly vivid imprint on the mind.
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Nicole Harsch, handed out a questionnaire about the event to the hundred and six students in their ten o’clock psychology 101 class, “Personality Development.” Where were the students when they heard the news? Whom were they with? What were they doing? The professor and his assistant carefully filed the responses away.
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Her hope is to understand how, exactly, emotional memories behave at all stages of the remembering process: how we encode them, how we consolidate and store them, how we retrieve them.
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When it comes to the central details of the event, like that the Challenger exploded, they are clearer and more accurate. But when it comes to peripheral details, they are worse. And our confidence in them, while almost always strong, is often misplaced.
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Within the brain, memories are formed and consolidated largely due to the help of a small seahorse-like structure called the hippocampus; damage the hippocampus, and you damage the ability to form lasting recollections.
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A key element of emotional-memory formation is the direct line of communication between the amygdala and the visual cortex.
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Phelps has combined Neisser’s experiential approach with the neuroscience of emotional memory to explore how such memories work, and why they work the way they do.
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Memory for the emotional scenes was significantly higher, and the vividness of the recollection was significantly greater.
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hat is, if you were shocked when you saw animals, your memory of the earlier animals was also enhanced. And, more important, the effect only emerged after six or twenty-four hours: the memory needed time to consolidate.
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o, if memory for events is strengthened at emotional times, why does everyone forget what they were doing when the Challenger exploded?
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The strength of the central memory seems to make us confident of all of the details when we should only be confident of a few.
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Our misplaced confidence in recalling dramatic events is troubling when we need to rely on a memory for something important—evidence in court, for instance
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After reviewing the evidence, the committee made several concrete suggestions to changes in current procedures, including “blinded” eyewitness identification
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standardized instructions to witnesses, along with extensive police training in vision and memory research as it relates to eyewitness testimony, videotaped identification, expert testimony early on in trials about the issues surrounding eyewitness reliability, and early and clear jury instruction on any prior identifications