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

Extending Reading: "It's Magical it's malleable, it's memory."
What is the relationship between memory and selfhood?
Our memories are mostly reconstructed, and these constructed memories affect our selfhood. We tend to believe that our self hood (who I am) is based on our experiences, but Lotus state that our memory not a bedrock, it is a like shifting sands. We tend to create false memories, and it could affect our self hood. For example in this article, Lotus believed that she did not see her mother’s dead body. After hearing the false insist from her uncle, “The memories began to drift back” She became to remember images and scene of the night that his mother was drown. She started to remember her mother’s face and polices cars. Her self hood started to change because new memories are constructed. After a few days her brother called him and said it was a mistake, she finally knew that her memory was made up. Her selfhood changed back since she knew that her new memories were constructed.

What new discovery about memory do you find most interesting?
First I believe that our selfhood could be affected by past events, I was wrong. After reading this article on memory, I realized that our complex memories are mostly reconstructed, and they are not a 100% record of the past events. If memories are like “quick sand” and could be easily constructed, this means that our selfhood could also be easily constructed. I am also surprised what our brain can do, our brain can encode different false memories ranging from person to person and we would not even realize that memories are reconstructed. We would tend to believe that the reconstructed memory is what we have been through. If our memories could be easily reconstructed and they are false memories, then should we really believe in our own memories and who we really are?

What is the homunculus crisis?
We have understood where memories are stored and what happens when memory is recalled, but we don’t know what stimulate it. Not knowing what activates us to retrieve memories is called the “homunculus crisis”. Memory is like a network of neurons that “activated when an event occurs and each time that network is stimulated the memory is strengthened or consolidated.” “Even the simplest memory stimulates complex neural networks at several different sites in the brain. The content (what happened) and meaning (how it felt) of an event are laid down in separate parts of the brain.”

Which theory of dreams finds support in the experiments by Lynch?
“In Canada, students who slept after cramming for an exam retained more information than those who pulled an all-nighter.” The experiment conducted by Lynch is a cognitive theory. Winson’s cognitive theory states that our dreams are a replay of daily experiences and it helps us learn and consolidate information. Students who slept after cramming for an exam are able to organize information during their sleep but the students who did not sleep for the entire night could not consolidate their learn information.

How can some memories become indelible?
Indelible memories are described as “carve its canyons and basins of memory into the living brain.” Memories that become indelible are often involved with “emotional arousing experiences”, when we are involved with traumatic experiences two powerful stress hormones will be released called adrenaline and noradealine. These stress hormones are so powerful that they could regulate the strength of storing memories and stimulates the heart to beat faster and muscles to be tense. These hormones could also stimulate the amygdale and produce an unconscious fear response.

How can amnesia and repression be explained?
Repression is when lost memories are later retrieved. Amnesia is when we could not recall a “horrendous event” because it was not initially encoded in to our brain. Amnesia often occurs on victim after injury; repressed memories are believed to be involved in any traumatic experience. Both amnesia and repression may be caused by the malfunction of the hippocampus. The hippocampus processes the memories, depicting words and pictures in to our explicit memory. However “Siegel thinks that some individuals remove conscious attention during repeated trauma.” But there is no direct evidence to prove how memories are impaired.

Explain the following statement: "Memory is more reconstructive than reproductive."
As demonstrated by psychologist John Neisser and John Dean, Richard Nixon could only give a general sense of what was going on in the meeting but failed to provide valid details in the meeting. This shows that human’s memories are incredibly accurate in the overall sense and hugely inaccurate in detail parts. Our memory does not encode all the aspects of an event, it choose to remember the outstanding events and often tends to forget all the detail. We tend to reconstruct the memories of forgotten details according to our preference or our emotions. The strength of the reconstructed memory depends on how many times we convince ourselves that a memory is true.

What new paradigm of memory is now emerging?
"Where memories are understood as creative blending of fact and fiction, where images are alchemized by experience and emotion into memories." When we retrieve memories, we first encode them in to our short term memory then to our long term memory. During the process of encoding, some of the actual details have been lost when it reaches to our long term memory. These forgotten memories are reconstructed in to the way that it makes meaning to us, “and the meaning-making process is shaped by who we are as self.”

After reading this article, what conclusions can you make about memory?
After reading this article, I have concluded that our selfhood keeps on changing due to the influence of our experiences and the reconstruction of our memory. From reading this article I have noticed that our memory is reconstructed according to our selfhood, and our selfhood is also related to our memories. I have also concluded that our memory is really powerful but it could not be trusted to a certain extant. Memory could bring a huge effect on a person’s life, since it is described as the foundation of a person.