Think about what you had for dinner last night. Now, think about what you were just doing ten seconds ago. I bet you were reading this article. Our short-term memory helps use store information about what happened in the past 15 to 30 seconds. After that, those memories are transferred to our long-term memory.
Long-term memory is where we store the things that we learn and experience over time. Different parts of our brain help us with our memory. Gaber said one of these is a parts is called the hippocampus, which helps convert short-term memories to long-term memories.
It also holds our memory of spaces and maps. He flipped the radio on while getting ready to go to work and heard the banter of the morning disc jockeys turn panicky as they related the events unfolding in Lower Manhattan. Nader ran to the roof of his apartment building, where he had a view of the towers less than two miles away. This is the wrong movie. In the following days, Nader recalls, he passed through subway stations where walls were covered with notes and photographs left by people searching desperately for missing loved ones.
Like millions of people, Nader has vivid and emotional memories of the September 11, , attacks and their aftermath. But as an expert on memory, and, in particular, on the malleability of memory, he knows better than to fully trust his recollections. Most people have so-called flashbulb memories of where they were and what they were doing when something momentous happened: the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy, say, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Unfortunately, staggeringly terrible news seems to come out of the blue more often than staggeringly good news. But as clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.
Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him. He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day.
Nader believes he may have an explanation for such quirks of memory. His ideas are unconventional within neuroscience, and they have caused researchers to reconsider some of their most basic assumptions about how memory works. In short, Nader believes that the very act of remembering can change our memories. Much of his research is on rats, but he says the same basic principles apply to human memory as well. In fact, he says, it may be impossible for humans or any other animal to bring a memory to mind without altering it in some way.
Memories surrounding a major event like September 11 might be especially susceptible, he says, because we tend to replay them over and over in our minds and in conversation with others—with each repetition having the potential to alter them. For those of us who cherish our memories and like to think they are an accurate record of our history, the idea that memory is fundamentally malleable is more than a little disturbing.
Not all researchers believe Nader has proved that the process of remembering itself can alter memories. But if he is right, it may not be an entirely bad thing.
It might even be possible to put the phenomenon to good use to reduce the suffering of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, who are plagued by recurring memories of events they wish they could put behind them. Nader was born in Cairo, Egypt. His Coptic Christian family faced persecution at the hands of Arab nationalists and fled to Canada in , when he was 4 years old.
He attended college and graduate school at the University of Toronto, and in joined the New York University lab of Joseph LeDoux, a distinguished neuroscientist who studies how emotions influence memory. Even the most cherished ideas in a given field are open to question. Scientists have long known that recording a memory requires adjusting the connections between neurons.
Each memory tweaks some tiny subset of the neurons in the brain the human brain has billion neurons in all , changing the way they communicate. Neurons send messages to one another across narrow gaps called synapses. A synapse is like a bustling port, complete with machinery for sending and receiving cargo—neurotransmitters, specialized chemicals that convey signals between neurons.
This process presumably helps in preventing you from recalling the wrong piece of information when racking your memory. The problem? Our brains can misidentify facts we actually want to remember as information that is no longer of use to us and rid of them.
One key to boosting memory is associating the needed information with other areas of your life. So, taking numbers and associating them with colors, for instance.
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