it's magical. it's malleable. it's...memory*

1. What is the relationship between memory and selfhood?
Our memories are created by processes in our brain that link experience with personal emotions felt in each life event. They could be reconstructed as a result of facts “blending” together with false events and people. It is the nature of our memory that shapes up our “autobiographical narrative”, which is the story of our lives as we personally view it. Therefore, our memory constructs the sense of self. Also, it could also be said that memory is a product of the self, which constantly seeks meaning in life and therefore shapes up our experiences and memories.

2. What new discovery about memory do you find most interesting?
I find the discovery that memory does not reside in a single, specific place in the human brain particularly interesting. I once thought that memories were stored in a specific place in the brain, and that if that place was destroyed, then all our memories would be wiped out. I find it very intriguing how the different aspects of each memory—emotions and experiences—are stored in entirely different parts of the brain, yet are still part of one memory. This is significant because then you could never destroy a memory by cutting off a particular part of the brain.

3. How can some memories become indelible?
Memories become permanent and sometimes even haunting when they become so “deeply engraved” in the brain due to the experience of a traumatic event that triggered a particularly strong emotional or stressful response in a person. During this event, the brain releases 2 very strong stress hormones that activate neurons in the brain, tense you up, and is believed to measure the strength of the storage of that memory. The more traumatic the event, the more permanent it becomes. Therefore, when the person is placed in a situation where that memory could be recalled, the emotions experienced then resurface. Other times, the emotional processing occurs beneath our conscious awareness.

4. How can amnesia and repression be explained?
Amnesia and repression could be explained by a problem in the hippocampus, which controls and processes explicit memory (declarative memory) during recall. It is possible that the functioning of the hippocampus is impaired when the situation is traumatic and strongly emotional; however, the other aspects of the memory are still stored in other parts of the brain (such as the amygdala). Although explicit memory is disrupted, implicit memory may not be and therefore it is still possible to be strongly influenced by the particular experience.

5. Explain the following statement: “Memory is more reconstructive than reproductive.
It states that memory is usually not recalled, or reproduced, exactly as it was when the person experienced it; as time passes, some of its elements and details are forgotten (and sometimes we tend to fill in those gaps with our own schemas). Although we remember the general meaning of an event clearly, we cannot exactly recall the small details of what we did and said.

6. What new paradigm of memory is now emerging?
Loftus stated that our reconstructed memories are a mixture of “fact and fiction” that are shaped up by our experiences and emotional impact. Also, a person’s idea of the memory shapes up the sense of self, and at the same time it develops from the self and perception of life.

7. After reading this article, what conclusions can you make about memory?
I could conclude that memory has a very paradoxical nature: it could develop the sense of self yet it is shaped up by the self; it is simple when reduced to the 3 seemingly straightforward processes of encoding, storage and retrieval, yet is extremely complicated in the sense that it stimulates very complex neural networks at multiple places in the human brain. I can also conclude that with the new advancements in the study of memory and technology that will enable these projects, it is possible to find out new information that could cure diseases and improve the way our memory works.

-- yuki