Category: Remembering

In Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) two of the characters discuss the idea synchronicity. They mention an experiment where people were isolated and given daily crosswords. If the crossword puzzles were a day old, meaning that thousands of people had already completed them, then people found it easier to get the answers – because the answers were already ‘out there’ in the collective memory of course.

The question is: did anyone ever really do this experiment, or anything like it, and what are the references? I’m not expecting that it would really produce a significant effect, but I’d still love to know if anyone has tried it.

Answers in the comments please

Link: Article on The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon from damninteresting.com

I’ve put the relevant except from the script below the fold…

Continue reading “waking life crossword experiment”

There’s an interesting New Scientist news report on recent research suggesting that people with amnesia have difficulty imagining the future, suggesting this ability relies on our capacity to remember past experience.

The study was led by Dr Eleanor Maguire and involved five participants with dense amnesia caused by damage to the hippocampus on both sides of the brain.

Researchers asked the participants ‚Äì and a control group without amnesia ‚Äì to imagine several future scenarios, such as visiting a beach, museum and castle, and to describe what the experience would be like. They then analysed the subjects’ narrations sentence by sentence, scoring each statement based on whether it involved references to spatial relationships, emotions or specific objects.

All but one of the amnesiacs were worse at imagining future events than the participants in the trial who did not suffer from amnesia. Their visualisations of future events were more likely to be disorganised and emotionless. “It’s not very real. It’s just not happening. My imagination isn’t‚Ķwell, I’m not imagining it, let’s put it that way,” one patient told researchers during a trial.

Apparently, the research will be published in the science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences but I’m damned if I can find it at their website or on PubMed, but presumably it will appear shortly.

Link to NewSci story ‘Amnesiacs struggle to imagine future events’.
Link to write-up from Nature News.

The opening of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Coleridge claimed he wrote the poem after experiencing a vision during an opium-induced sleep, but was woken by a ‘person from Porlock’ before it was complete.

Coleridge’s biographer, Richard Holmes, suggests that because we tend to remember dreams best when we’re woken in their midst, rather than cutting short the poetic inspiration, the ‘person from Porlock’ may have actually saved this vision from sinking into the depths of unconsciousness.

However, it’s not clear whether the vision genuinely occurred as Coleridge claimed, so this remains speculation.

If you’re interested in a more in-depth analysis of this poem that Coleridge called a “a psychological curiosity”, there’s an excellent article in the PsyArt journal that examines it using a number of cognitive and psychological theories.

Link to full text of Kubla Khan.
Link to article on the poem from PsyArt.

“A Saxon king of the early seventh century, Eadbald, was described in the language of the early eighth century as troubled by frequent fits of insanity and ‘by the attack of a foul spirit’ after marrying his late father’s second wife.

But he had also rejected Christianity which his father Ethelbert had taken up, and the missionaries in Kent were going through a difficult period; so, apart from the meaninglessness of the description, some character assassination may be involved in the record.”

From p48 of Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain (ISBN 0708305628) by Basil Clarke.

As part of the BBC Memory Season, BBC Radio 4 are running a series of programmes on people with unique memories – either because of disorder or because of remarkable talents.

The series is called Me and My Memory and started last Wednesday.

All the programmes are archived online, and the first was on prosopagnosia – the condition where people are unable to recognise others by their faces.

In this case, the programme talks to a woman who developed prosopagnosia after viral encephalitis, a brain infection that damaged parts of the brain involved in face recognition.

Future programmes will be on developmental amnesia, a memory champion, confabulation and mild cognitive impairment.

Link to homepage for Me and My Memory series.

“Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.”

Philosopher Charles Peirce in Vol VII of his Collected Papers.

Cognitive scientist and owner of the Developing Intelligence blog Chris Chatham has finished his series on memory distortions, arguing that common forms of memory failure can be explained within a concise model of maintenance, search, and monitoring.

The ‘seven sins’ are a reference to a more complex model put forward by psychologist Dan Schacter, in a well-known book on the subject.

Chatham explains each in turn, and gives details of how he feels they can all be explained by more fundamental functions of the mind.

* The Seven Sins of Memory
* The Transience of Memory
* Lost keys: Memory Search Failures
* Lost in the Network: Failures of Memory Architecture
* Memory’s Gates: Failures of Monitoring
* Origins of Memory Distortion

The series has been an engaging look at some of the most important theories in contemporary memory research, as well as highlighting a few curious gems, such as the scientific basis for Freudian-style repressed memories.

Even if you don’t entirely agree with Chatham’s take on the psychology of memory, there’s plenty of food for thought in what has been a lucid series on a mysterious human ability.

I’m always impressed by the way Cognitive Daily manage to break down sometimes quite complex research into straightforward explanations, and their and try-it-yourself experiment on visual working memory is no exception.

Their article is a wonderful tour through a recent paper that examines visual memory for briefly presented scenes.

The first part of a series on memory failures has just appeared on the increasingly compulsive cognitive science blog Developing Intelligence.

The site is run by cognitive neuroscientist Chris Chatham who summarises the ‘seven sins of memory’ – Daniel Schacter’s famous description of the seven ways in which memory can become distorted or degraded.

Schacter first described his ideas in a landmark paper and later in an accessible book of the same name.

Chris has a different approach, however, and will be setting out his alternative views over the coming week:

In contrast to Schacter’s “seven sins of memory” (1999), I argue that all types of memory inaccuracy arise from three distinct types of memory system failure: those of maintenance, of search, and of monitoring. Failures of maintenance include problems involving prospective memory (“forgetting to remember”), rapid forgetting, and absent-mindedness. Failures of search include retrieval-induced forgetting, tip-of-the-tongue phenomena, and amnesia. Failures of monitoring include source misattribution, memory biases, and suggestibility. Finally, other memory inaccuracies may actually result from interactions among multiple sources of failure.

In this week’s upcoming posts, I will review each of these categories of memory failure in turn, and describe how they can account for all types of memory inaccuracy when taken together.

Link to post at Developing Intelligence.

“As soon as he started work at the hospital he became…fascinated by the differences in severity of break down between the different branches of the RFC. Pilots, though they did indeed break down, did so less frequently and usually less severely than the men who manned observation balloons. They, floating helplessly above the battlefields, unable to either avoid attack or to defend themselves effectively against it, showed the highest incidence of breakdown of any service. Even including infantry officers. This reinforced Rivers’s view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace”.

The thoughts of army psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers from the novel Regeneration by Pat Barker. In Regeneration, the first of a trilogy, Barker blends fact with fiction in her depiction of the relationship between Rivers and the celebrated poet Siegfried Sassoon, at Craiglockhart during the First World War.

The Implicit Association Test [1] is a sorting task which reveals something about our automatic, non-deliberate, associations [2].

The part of the test which betrays our automatic associations is a combination of two simpler sorting tasks. Both simple tasks involve sorting words and pictures into categories which are assigned to the left and right (by pressing the E and I keys, which are on the left and right of your keyboard). One task is to sort words (like ‘love’, or ‘failure’) into the categories ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The other task varies depending on what you want to detect automatic associations about. In the ‘race IAT’ the task is to sort pictures of the faces of white americans and the faces of black americans. The race IAT isn’t the only version, but it is the most (in)famous (you can also do the IAT on fat vs thin, arab-muslim vs non-arab-muslims, for different US presidents and in many other variations). The compound task involves sorting both words and pictures to the left and right where each side has two categories assigned to it – so ‘good’ and ‘black american’ on the left, and ‘bad’ and ‘white american’ on the right, for example.

What the IAT test does is compare your times for sorting good words when the ‘good’ side is also the ‘white’ side to when the ‘good’ side is also the ‘black’ side (and vice versa for sorting bad words, and for sorting white and black faces to the good and bad sides). By doing these comparisons the test can detect any evaluation of ‘white’ or ‘black’ as positive or negative that is affecting your time to classify the words or faces to the correct side. So, for example, if you take significantly longer to sort good words to the ‘black’ side than you do to the ‘white’ side then the result is an automatic preference for ‘white americans’ over ‘black americans’ [3]

What the Racial IAT indicates is that most Americans have an automatic preference for whites over blacks. Two things are important about this. First it isn’t really clear what mechanisms lie behind the effects found in the test (‘Voodoo’ is one suggestion!), nor is it clear what they mean [4]. Second, the automatic preference shows up for most people, even in those who consciously express no race preferences and even in many black americans.

Now where did this automatic preference come from? It certainly can’t be deliberate attitudes, since the bias shows up in people (including many black americans) who have explicitly anti-racist attitudes. Some suggestions have been made, like they are the residual of previously held explicit attitudes, or the result of a ‘cultural bias’ (whatever that means) [5], but I think a strong, and more likely causal [6], possibility is that that these preferences are the result of systematic exposure to particular associations (i.e that white = good and black = bad). Associations can become established in memory merely by the repeated co-presentation of two things (conditioning), there doesn’t need to be any logical connection between the two. So if on television the adverts for flash cars and happy domestic scenes always feature white folks and the the crime shows more often have black folks as the bad guys you’re going to absorb those associations.

The researchers running the project imply as much in an answer in their FAQ

…it is very possible to possess an automatic preference that you would rather not have (and the researchers who developed this test are convinced that they, too, fall into this category). One solution is to seek experiences that could undo or reverse the patterns of experience that could have created the unwanted preference. But this is not always easy to do. A more practical alternative may be to remain alert to the existence of the undesired preference, recognizing that it may intrude in unwanted fashion into your judgments and actions. Additionally, you may decide to embark on consciously planned actions that can compensate for known unconscious preferences and beliefs.”

(My emphasis).

The interesting thing for me about the hypothesis that these automatic preferences develop from repeated exposure to particular associations is that you do not need to believe the associations on any deliberate level, nor do you need particularly to pay attention to them, all you need to do is to have them as part of your environment. In that way our Implicit Associations reflect a part of our minds which belongs as much to the environment of our experience as to ourselves – and, additionally, is as much common to everyone who has shared our environment as it is unique to our individual minds.

And this relates to advertising. Adverts are ubiquitous. Advertising shapes the statistical content of the stimuli we are exposed too, however much we decide to give ourselves certain experiences. Does the IAT give us a glimpse of the consequences we reap from an unclean mental environment? [7]

References below the fold

Continue reading “where do implicit associations come from?”

You go to the supermarket and stop by some shelves offering French and German wine. You buy a bottle of French wine. After going through the checkout you are asked what made you choose that bottle of wine. You say something like “It was the right price”, or “I liked the label”. Did you notice the French music playing as you took it off the shelf? You probably did. Did it affect your choice of wine? No, you say, it didn’t.

That’s funny because on the days we play French music nearly 80% of people buying wine from those shelves choose French wine, and on the days we play German music the opposite happens

This study was done by Adrian North and colleagues from the University of Leicester [1]. They played traditional French (accordion music) or traditional German (a Bierkeller brass band – oompah music) music at customers and watched the sales of wine from their experimental wine shelves, which contained French and German wine matched for price and flavour. On French music days 77% of the wine sold was French, on German music days 73% was German – in other words, if you took some wine off their shelves you were 3 or 4 times more likely to choose a wine that matched the music than wine that didn’t match the music.

Did people notice the music? Probably in a vague sort of way. But only 1 out of 44 customers who agreed to answer some questions at the checkout spontaneously mentioned it as the reason they bought the wine. When asked specifically if they thought that the music affected their choice 86% said that it didn’t. The behavioural influence of the music was massive, but the customers didn’t notice or believe that it was affecting them. Similar experiments have shown that classical music can make people buy more expensive wine [2], or spend more in restaurants [3].

Is this manipulation? There’s no coercion, all the customers are certainly wine buyers who are probably more or less in the mood to buy some wine. But they have been influenced in what kind of wine they buy and they don’t know that they have.

What would be the effect, I wonder, of having someone stand by the shelves saying to the customers as they passed “Why don’t you buy a French wine today”? My hunch is that you’d make people think about their decision a lot more – just by trying to persuade them you’d turn the decision from a low involvement one into a high involvement one. People would start to discount your suggestion. But the suggestion made by the music doesn’t trigger any kind of monitoring. Instead, the authors of this study believe, it triggers memories associated with the music – preferences and frames of reference. Simply put, hearing the French music activates [4] ideas of ‘Frenchness’ – maybe making customers remember how much they like French wine, or how much they enjoyed their last trip to France. For a decision which people aren’t very involved with, with low costs either way (both the French and German wines are pretty similar, remember, except for their nationality) this is enough to swing the choice.

This priming affect is, I believe, one of the major ways advertising works [5]. Simply by making it more likely for us to remember certain things, we are more likely to make decisions biased in a certain way. There’s no compulsion, nobody has their free-will wrenched from their conscious grip. There’s just an environment shaped a certain way to encourage certain ideas. And how could anything be wrong with that?

Refs & Footnotes below the fold:

Continue reading “music, wine and will”

Whilst looking for an article in the British Journal of Psychiatry I came across this curious letter, noting an accurate description of déjà vu in the lyrics of an Iron Maiden song.

…

Sir: Sno, Linszen and De Jonge have <a href="reviewed a number of descriptions of d√©j√† vu in poetry and literature (Journal, April 1992, 160, 511-518). There is another particularly striking example. It is the song “D√©j√† vu” by Dave Murray and Steve Harris (1986) from the album Somewhere in Time by the rock group Iron Maiden. It vividly illustrates many of the points made by Sno et al in their article. The song gives an accurate phenomenological description of d√©j√† vu. It implicitly suggests reincarnation as an explanation and it refers explicitly to precognition (“And you know what’s coming next”) and to feelings of depersonalisation (“And you feel that this moment in time is surreal”). The full lyrics are reproduced here with the kind permission of Iron Maiden Publishing (Overseas) Ltd, administered by Zomba Musica Publishers Ltd.

When you see familiar faces
But you can’t remember where they’re from
Could you be wrong?

When you’ve been particular places
That you know you’ve never seen before
Can you be sure?

‘Cause you know this has happened before
And you know that this moment in time is for real
And you know when you feel déjà vu.

Chorus:
Feels like I’ve been here before (rpt. four times)

Ever had a conversation
That you realise you’ve had before
Isn’t it strange?

Have you ever talked to someone
And you feel you know what’s coming next
It feel pre-arranged.

‘Cause you know that you’ve heard it before
And you feel that this moment in time is surreal
‘Cause you know when you feel d√©j√† vu

Chorus

Sno et al suggest that psychiatrists “should be encouraged to overstep the limits of psychiatric literature and read literary prose and poetry as well” because “novelists and poets excel in [the] ability to depict subjective experiences”. While agreeing with this point of view, I would go further. Literature and art are capable of an emotional response in the person who experiences them. This can lead to a far deeper empathic or subjective understanding of an experience than is possible from a scientific description. Wide reading and exposure to the arts enables us to share, if only partially and in completely, the experience of our patients. We can understand them better, not just at an intellectual level, but as people like ourselves.

Bill Plummer
Mental Health Advice Centre, Folkstone, Kent.
…

Rock on Dr Plummer. Even more intriguingly, the following letter in the same issue is about hypnotised lobsters, but I think that will have to wait until another time.

Link to letter’s PubMed entry.

This weekend, the World Memory Championships are coming to Oxford University. The event is being hosted by the UK Festival of the Mind, which involves lectures from memory champions and experts on advanced learning techniques.

On the BBC Radio Four Today programme this morning, Dominic O’Brien, eight times World Memory Champion, demonstrated his ability to remember the order of a shuffled pack of cards, after just a few minutes studying them. You can listen to the item again here.

In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun studying superior memory and memory feats, although the area is relatively neglected compared with the study of memory deficit.

In 2002 Dr. Eleanor Maguire at UCL’s Functional Imagaing Lab in London used fMRI scanning to compare the brain structure and function of 10 memory champions with that of 10 healthy controls. To find out what they discovered, read on by clicking below.

Continue reading “The 2005 World Memory Championships”

Cognitive Daily has an elegant summary of research on why we don’t remember the first years of life. The results suggest that it may be because young children lack the language resources to support the necessary memories.

I would be tempted to quote some of the post here, but its described so succinctly its probably best just to read the original.

Link to ‘Why do we forget our childhood?’ from Cognitive Daily.

So I’m in this month’s edition of Wired, just a short quote. Since it’s here and it’s now I’ve reproduced the full quote I sent them below:

> I’m looking for a response to this question: “Are tools like Google and PDAs
> ruining our ability to remember things?”

So we have this amazing brain which constantly scans our environment and seeks out short-cuts. New bits of tech, like google or mobile phones, stop being strange very quickly (even though, truely, they’re just incredible. Unthinkable just a few years ago). They get absorbed, become artifical information-processing prosthetics. Are they making us forget things? Sure, we’re forgetting the things they allow us not to have to remember. But when we use something, or design something, we get a choice about what it asked us to remember. My mobile phone means the only numbers i remember are the ones i deliberately haven’t put in their so i’m forced to learn them. Not knowing any phone numbers is fine – as long as i don’t lose my phone. Then it becomes a bit of a problem.

But phone numbers are hard to learn anyway – a hang-up from an old technology. The situation is completely reversed for getting in touch with people through the web. Knowing the URL or email isn’t so useful – it might change. But with Google, knowing a person’s name (exactly the piece of information you store in your phone to allow you to forget their number) means you can find their details on-line in seconds. The technology lets us forget an implementational detail, and allows us to concentrate on remembering a versatile, tech-enabled, solution.