Blogpost 6: Inherited Memories!?

Have you ever realized how most singer friends you know have musical parents? or maybe your artistically inclined fiends tend to have a father or a mother who can paint or draw? Even child actors mostly have celebrity parents, or at least a relative who is into showbiz. Could it be that skills, talents and other experiences be genetically inherited? Hmmmm probably not, it may mostly concern the environment they grew up in, but it is an interesting idea to think that memories and experiences made by your parents can be transferred to you.

This is where epigenetics comes in. According to Denise Chow from Live Science in his article "Why Your DNA May Not Be Your Destiny" epigenetics...

"...are biological markers on DNA that modify gene expression without altering the underlying sequence...."

This only means that you really don't have to be a genetic engineer to change your genes, instead you just have to make sure you undergo certain situations like trauma, stress or famine in your life to affect your genes, which I don't really recommend. But the fact remains that we can still change our genes while we live through experiences, diets and even just the events we just witnessed.

"Must... change... gene pool..."

Now this is all cool and all, but what does this all have to do with memory? Since most of the changes that happens in our genes are due to our life experiences in the present, what does it all have to do with memory?
Well this is because these epigenetic changes that we acquired are hereditary, meaning the changes are actually remembered and stored in the DNA. Also all the stupid things you did when you were alive may still be remembered and affect your children, your grandchildren and so on.

According to Dan Hurley from Discover in his article "Grandma's Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes" this is how these epigenetic changes are remembered thru the use of methyl groups found in your molecular structure.

"The methyl group works like a placeholder in a cookbook, attaching to the DNA within each cell to select only those recipes — er, genes — necessary for that particular cell’s proteins. Because methyl groups are attached to the genes, residing beside but separate from the double-helix DNA code"

More on genetics and memories, scientist discovered the gene that is responsible in forming memories called the Npas4. In Sebastian Anthony's article named "MIT discovers memory gene, breeds fearless mammals" from Extreme Tech, he describes the experiment done by neuroscientists on rats.

"...a healthy mouse receives a mild electric shock whenever it enters a specific chamber — and within a few minutes, it freezes in fear when it next comes across the same chamber. By knocking out Npas4 — manipulating the DNA so that the Npas4 gene is no longer present — the neuroscientists created mice that couldn’t form memories and kept running through the chamber, irrespective of the continued electric shocks. In other words, they bred mice that were fearless."

Now imagine an army without fear, willing to do every task you order. An army of mice that is since, although Npas4 is also present in human genes, it is most probably illegal to create an army of mindless, fearless humans, not to mention the waiting it will take till they get to 18 yrs. of age.

But this research does yield promising results, after identifying the gene responsible for forming new memories, and knowing that knocking it out stops the formation of new memories, humanity is one step closer in the possibility of possibly being able to maybe erasing specific memories in our minds.

Blogpost 5: Who? What? Huh?

Though most of us would like to have a super power memory, it is actually good to sometimes be able to forget. And I am not talking about forgetting because you don't want to remember your old crush, or how your boy/girlfriend dumped you. I am talking about forgetting because the information you garnered was wrong.

In the age of information, answers are just a few clicks away. You can ask if there are classes today, or maybe on how to pick up chicks, anything you can imagine under the sun you can probably find on the internet. But remember that not all of them are true. What if the website that told you if there are classes was outdated, or the guy who wrote the article on how to pick up chicks is actually a jealous girl that is trying to keep you from getting any luck, point is there are lots of information available on the internet, but they may or may not even be true. So you have to forget those misinformation.

This is where hypercorrection comes in. In an article by  Drake Bennet entitled "The science of forgetting" on Bloomberg he mentioned that hypercorrection is when... 

" ...a person learns that something they really thought was true is in fact false, they tend to remember the correct answer. But if they only halfheartedly believed the incorrect information to begin with, they’re more likely to forget the correct answer. "

Meaning that it is actually easier to remember information that you were corrected on. For example, the Americans were the first people on space, where in fact it was the Russians that first orbited earth from outer space. You will remember this fact better now, to a certain extent.

Since errors that we are sure are correct are deeply entrenched in our minds, says psychologist Andrew Butler, overtime we are more likely to go back to those erroneous beliefs. And why is it so deeply entrenched in our minds, because we constantly hear it again and again and again.

Yet another reason why we should forget is that forgetting is actually important in the creation of new memories. This may also be the reason why children are better in understanding semantic memories, or memories that contains meanings and understandings (e.g. language and letters), more than others. Because according to Ian Chant from Scientific American in his article "Forgetting Is Harder for Older Brains' the brain cells...

"...become wired together with new synapses, the connections between neurons that enable communication. When a memory fades, those synapses weaken. "

Now bear in mind that in able to forget, the brain uses a special protein that helps destroy these synapses. But according to research, that as you get older the body produces much larger levels of protein that, instead of destroying these synapses, actually prevents such forgetting, making learning and memorizing new information harder and more laborious as we age.

Blogpost 4: Myths About Memory

Have you ever heard of the rumor that people only use 10% of their brains. Well I can tell you now that it is a myth. According to Robynne Boydin in his article "Do People Only Use 10 Percent Of Their Brains?" from Scientific American, this urban legend most likely started from the American psychologist William James, who said in his book "The Energies of Men" that "We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources."

But why are these myths so prevalent? Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris has this to say, from their research article "What People Believe about How Memory Works: A Representative Survey of the U.S. Population" found on Plos One;

"The prevalence of mistaken beliefs in the general public implies that similar misunderstandings likely are common among jurors and could well lead to flawed analyses of testimony that involves memory. At least for these basic properties of memory, commonsense intuitions are more likely to be wrong than right. "

These myths are prevalent because. Aside from movies and comics that keeps on reiterating this urban legend, this particular myth became famous because of psychics. People that claims to be able to bend spoons with their minds, have ESP, photographic memories and other psychic abilities. They claim that they are able to do these things because they have unlocked more than 10% of their mind, and that you can do to! For a small fee that is.

Another memory myth made famous is that memory works like a video camera. Recording everything you see, hear, touch, feel, and taste as it happened. It's not, because if the brain pays attention to everything  it ever sensed, we would be overloaded with information before we even walk out the door. Think General Zod without his helmet.

Here is an example on how absent-minded we can really be. Here Jeremy Dean from Psyblog, expressed his delight in his article "Absent-Mindedness: A Blessing in Disguise?" when he was asked to be a participant wherein they were asked to watch a video of people passing a ball between each other and asked to count how many passes were made.

"I sat watching the video, counting the passes. Then, after the video was finished, I was asked if I noticed anything unusual. I was completely bemused: "What do you mean anything 'unusual'," I said. "I've just seen people passing a basketball to each other. What are you talking about?"

The experimenter smiled and set the video clip running again, but this time with no instructions to count the passes. I watched in amazement as after about 30 seconds of people passing the basketball, a person dressed in a gorilla suit walks right through the centre of the scene, stops, turns, looks at the camera, then turns again and walks out of shot. The gorilla is visible for fully 5 seconds. I didn't notice a thing."

This experiment just shows how our memory is able to filter out information that it deems unnecessary. This doesn't really mean that our memory is bad, think of it as the mind's way of focusing on one object. 

Blogpost 3: Philosophy of Memory

When was the last time you watched a movie? Do you remember the red curtain opening and the movie starting? How about the bright red sign that says "EXIT" How about when you got home, did you remember how the top light lighted green just in time for you to drive pass onward?

Well unless you're in a really old movie theatre that violates fire safety laws and legislations, and with an upside down traffic light, this probably didn't happen. Since curtains are usually no longer in use, fire exit signs are lit green inside the cinemas and because a traffic light always has the red light on top. So where did you get these memories?

Because of how the way our brain works, memory is constantly shaped and reshaped by our knowledge, emotions, feelings and belief. Here, Ms. Jennifer Horton from Discovery lists down the five ways on how our brain can create false memories in her article "Top 5 Ways False Memories are Formed" .

1. misinformation
2. misattribution
3. fuzzy tracing
4. emotion
5. inference

Now, with all these five elements in place, the brain can actually 'remember' a thing or event that never actually happened. Now imagine all the eye witness accounts that sent innocent people to jail.

Let me give you a short description of the five. Misinformation is when you are given a wrong information e.g. a man saying that the guy was wearing a green shoe. Misattribution, when you combine details from two different events. Fuzzy tracing, when one gives a generalized meaning to an event instead of its details, leading in wrong information. Emotion, is when your emotion actually alters your memory. And inference are altered memory due to bias and preference.

Knowing all that, what do you think of your memory now? Do you still think that it is like a video recorder that records every event as it happened? It's not, and it's pretty scary to think how suggestive our mind really is.

Which brings us to hypnosis. Hypnotic therapy uses the power of suggestion to help enhance a persons memory to be able to remember a past event that may have caused trauma.  If, let's say, that hypnosis really does work can it also be used to alter memory or maybe even create new ones? Let us turn to science to answer this question.

In Jeremy Dean's article entitled "Implanting False Memories: Lost in the Mall & Paul Ingram" from Psyblog, he wrote about Elizabeth Loftus' Lost in the mall technique.

"In a seminal study Loftus and Pickrell (1995) recruited 24 participants who were to be presented with four stories from when they were between 4 and 6 years old, three of which were true, and one false. ...Each family was also asked to provide the circumstances of another event that could possibly have happened, but didn't. In each case the false memory was for getting lost in a shopping mall. Relatives provided details of a specific shopping mall it could have been along with other details to make the fake story plausible."

The result? After revealing to the participants that one of the four memories is actually false, out of the 24 participants, 5 falsely recalled the made-up 'lost in the mall' memory. This may not seem so impressive, but this shows that suggestions do have power over our memories.

Blogpost 2: Mnemonics

Here is a little test of memory. What I want you to do is memorize this list in under a minute, and after reading this blogpost, test yourself again if you can remember it.

1. Car

2. Dog

3. Cat

4. Pen

5. House

6. Tornado

7. Egg

8. Shoe

9. Chicken

10. Bag

In class, teachers always tells us what to study, but did you notice that they never taught us how to study? What I observed in students while studying, whether it is for an exam, a game show, or just for the sake of knowing something new, is that we usually do a process called rote learning.

Rote learning is the process of repeating a word, a phrase or a sentence again and again until it get stuck in your mind long enough for you to remember it the next day. Now this has its advantages, but first let me just tell you about some other forms of learning, the first one being visual mnemonics.

Visual mnemonics got its name from how you use it. Visual meaning you use images and symbols to create a mental picture in your mind, and mnemonics which is basically an umbrella term for all the little tips and tricks that may aid you in memory retention (e.g ROYGBIV for remembering the names if the rainbow).

Now what we do in visual mnemonics is very simple, and it only requires you to do two tasks;

    The first one, being able to form a mental image of the word in your head.

    Second, is to associate that image with another picture or symbol already in your head.

Sounds complicated? Let us just use the example above;

Above are ten numbers from 1 to 10. Now what we are going to do is to associate each number with a specific symbol. For number one let's use the image of a bun, for no.two, a shoe, no. three is a tree, for four, a door, five is a hive, six are sticks, seven is heaven, eight is gate, nine is a line and the number ten is a hen. Easy right? 

Now next is we associate. To associate is pretty simple, for number one, our image is that of a car. So let's find a way to see how a car and a bun can associate. How about a car with buns for a windshield? See? The crazier the association, the easier it is to retrieve it later on. Don't just simply take a car with a bun on top. Do this for the next 9 items and you're good to go.

But the question is not how, but why visual mnemonics work? And why is it better that rote learning? Well to answer the first question, it is because of the brain's inherent quality to prefer visual imagery over words. Meaning that the more vivid the imagery, the more the brain pays attention to it. And this is also the reason why charts and graphs work so well with students.

But does this make visual mnemonics better than rote learning? It depends really, for one thing visual mnemonics takes longer to prepare, while rote takes up virtually no preparation at all. Secondly visual mnemonics works better with lists and bullets, you can't really associate the whole history of the Philippine's with just one image can you? And finally, to learn a visual mnemonic, one must memorize it first usually using a process called rote learning. So you can't exactly call it superior.

Blogpost 1: Photographic Memory?

To have a photographic memory may seem like the handiest tool to have. Who wouldn't like to have it, having to be able to recall events, letters or words without a second thought, what a breeze it'll be. But does it really exist?

Photographic memory, or eidetic memory in proper terms, is when a person can recall events, images and other objects with such accuracy, it's almost like seeing it in a photograph. It became a popular topic in mainstream media, having many characters allegedly having this skill, like; Dr. Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory, Professor X from the X-men, and more recently, Mike Ross from Suits.

But how exactly does memory work? Well it surely doesn't work like the famous, tiny filing cabinet image with little memory files all over, nor is it like a super computer with thousands of servers and disk space to put it all into. It is a bit more complicated than that.

In April Holladay's article "How does human memory work?" from USA Today, she said that memory involves three processes; encoding, storage and retrieval.

After seeing hearing, tasting or feeling something, our brain starts encoding it. Encoding is when the brain starts to make sense of all the things you just sensed. Storing, is when we store the sensory information that we just got, and finally retrieving, or when we want to remember something again.

Now some scientists believe that the brain never forgets,and that what really causes us to forget is not in the storing of the memory, but in retrieving it. In Sarah McLeod's article "Forgetting" from Simple Psychology, she talks about Retrieval Failure Theory or when...

" ....the information is in long term memory, but cannot be accessed.  Such information is said to be available (i.e. it is still stored) but not accessible (i.e. it cannot be retrieved). It cannot be accessed because the retrieval cues are not present."

Retrieval cues are what people use as hints that can help you retrieve a particular memory. So when we store a memory we also store a retrieval cue that can help you remember that memory when you encounter that same situation. For example, you remember a friend when you passed by his house. But photographic memory doesn't work that way.

Photographic memory works without cues. Photographic memory works on thin air, without any cues whatsoever, nothing physically present in the present that can help us remember and therefore requires more effort in uncovering that specific memory. 

Now to retrieve a past event, what people without photographic memory do is to piece together the various sensory information that we stored (sight, sound, touch) to create one giant picture. Kind of like a jigsaw puzzle more than an exact photograph. Now because of this particular process why we are very good at only remembering a very general concept of an event, but not so much in its details. 

For example, imagine a picture of a car. You remember its shape, its general position (whether or not it was facing you) and possibly maybe if its headlight was on or off. Now here is when photographic memory comes in. Basically people with a photographic memory can remember everything from that car, from its color, type and plate number.

Now back to photographic memory, does it really exist? Well according to Joshua Foer from the Slate in his article Kaavya Syndrome there is one person that supposedly has this skill, and she was born in the 1970's. Her name is Elizabeth.

"In 1970, a Harvard vision scientist named Charles Stromeyer III published a landmark paper in Nature about a Harvard student named Elizabeth, who could perform an astonishing feat. Stromeyer showed Elizabeth's right eye a pattern of 10,000 random dots, and a day later, he showed her left eye another dot pattern. She mentally fused the two images to form a random-dot stereogram and then saw a three-dimensional image floating above the surface."

Elizabeth, supposedly can recall random dot patterns with such accuracy that she can even make a 3D image out of them. However the methods and documentary of this skill is somewhat cloudy. First of all Charles Stromeyer, the guy who administered the test, turned out to be her future-husband, and the fact that the test has never been repeated. So about photographic memory, well I guess it is still an unsolved myth as far as I'm concerned.