UNDERSTANDING MEMORY:

EXPLAINING THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MEMORY THROUGH MOVIES

Memory Processes and Memory Movies

What is Memory? (Film: Finding Nemo)

Memory is really a collection of independent systems in the brain that enable us to learn and
remember different types of information.

Each memory system including working memory, episodic memory, semantic memory and
procedural memory serves a different purpose.

We can think of WORKING MEMORY as the mind’s work bench.

It enables us to keep thoughts in mind.
We use it to maintain and manipulate our thoughts in conscious awareness.
We can use working memory to think verbally as in remembering a friend's phone number by
mentally rehearsing the digits or we can use it to think visually as in imagining how our bedroom
would look if we rearranged all of the furniture. As soon as we think of something else, the focus of
working memory changes. Working memory is temporary designed for short-term retention. The
remaining ones are long-term.

EPISODIC MEMORY The type of memory we use for retaining the experiences that make up our
life. Episodic memory involves the conscious recall of personal experiences. It is the type of memory
we use whenever we travel mentally backward in time remembering past events such as a favorite
holiday... Whenever we engage in personal recollection, we are using our episodic memory, the
long-term memory system that I will focus on in this course

SEMANTIC MEMORY is also long-term, but instead of personal recollections, it represents the
factual knowledge that we have learned over time and it involves more than just word meanings.
Facts such as the meaning of the word ecology, one plus one equals two and bats are nocturnal
animals are all examples of semantic knowledge.

To help keep episodic and semantic memory separate in your mind, think of episodic memory as
specific to a time and place as in remembering, for example, your first kiss, while semantic memory
is more generic, as in your understanding of the meaning of a kiss.

The last type of long-term memory is called PROCEDURAL MEMORY and it represents our ability to
learn and perform complex activities and skills. Skilled actions, such as riding a bicycle or driving a
car are acquired slowly through trial and error learning. But once acquired, they can be retained for a
lifetime. Unlike episodic or semantic memory that can be declared, procedural memory can only be
demonstrated. We demonstrate procedural memory by doing it, not by describing it.

Our memory systems differ in a number of ways, including their capacity and duration.
One is short-term, the others are long term. Short-term memory enables us to retain a small amount
of information for a short period of time. Long-term memory permits us to retain a vast amount of
information for an indefinite period of time.
Sometimes people get these terms mixed up, mistakenly stating that they have no short-term
memory when they really mean that they have trouble recalling something from the recent past.

FINDING NEMO (Dory) In fact, Dory does not have a short term memory problem,
she has a problem making new long-term memories.

For psychologist, remembering what you did a short time ago is recent long term not short-term
memory. Short-term memory involves the present. It is what is on your mind at the moment and the
memory system responsible for short-term retention is called working memory.

these memory systems can function independently. A person can suffer an impairment in one
system while leaving the others intact. For example, following a concussion a person might have
trouble making new episodic memories, yet still be able to learn new procedural skills.

Eg. But in terms of our everyday behavior, these memory systems typically work together with little
input or direction by us. As an example, think about how we use these systems on going to the
movies with a friend. You might begin by accessing the movie app on your iPad using your
procedural memory, scan the reviews of films that are playing engaging your semantic memory and
pick one film, because you remember enjoying previous films by that director utilizing your episodic
memory. In calling your friend on your cellphone using procedural memory again, you recognize her
voice, episodic memory again, talk over the film options, working and semantic memory now before
driving to the theater using your procedural memory.
Once in a while, one of these memory systems might fail us as when we forget, for example, where
we left the car keys, a failure of episodic memory in this instance. But remarkably, we take these
systems for granted using them multiple times everyday without thinking.

what is memory? as it is said by psychologist Endel Tulving, a gift of nature, the ability to acquire,
retain and use information or knowledge.

Memory's Everyday Function (Demonstrations to Try)

Memory involves acquiring, retaining and using information or knowledge.

It does much more, much more than just help us remember the past.
To understand memory's everyday function, we must first learn to think correctly about memory and
that means we're going to look at some illusions.
According to Psychologist Henry Roediger: a memory illusion occurs when a rememberer's report of
a past event seriously deviates from the event's actual occurrence. In other words, when our
recollection differs from reality.

Research shows that if we repeatedly imagine these false events over time, many of us will come to
believe that some of them actually occurred. Our episodic memories are usually reliable, but
such finding indicate that they're not always accurate. Sometimes, our memories are false.

Our memory is rarely perfect. Our memory normally works well enough for us to function effectively.
Otherwise, our species would not have survived. Yet, it is subject to a variety of errors, biases and
distortions

Psychologist Frederic Bartlett observed long ago in his book, Remembering, that when we read
stories, our memory for those stories is rarely perfect. What we remember is usually the gist of the
story well. But when parts of it are vague or incomplete in our mind, we often fill in those missing
pieces by making reasonable inferences on the basis of what must have happened. We do this
unknowingly, Bartlett said, to make sense of the story based on what we know. Because we can
misremember, our memory is more reconstructive than reproductive in nature.

Psychologist Ulric Neisser provided an appropriate analogy. In remembering the past, he said, we
act like paleontologists who after digging up fragments of a dinosaur's bones we are able to
reconstruct the dinosaur in full from those recovered bits and fragments. The dinosaur analogy is
important for thinking correctly about memory. It says, that our memory is imperfect, because we do
not file a way in the brain snapshots of our past experiences. Instead, when we experience an event,
we interpret that experience and our interpretation is influenced by many different factors.

What factors? Psychologist Marcia Johnson described this well.

Memories, she said, are attributions that we make about our mental experiences based on their
subjective qualities, our prior knowledge and beliefs, our motives and goals and the social context.
Thinking about memory this way tells us why two people can remember the same event differently.
Their memory will differ if their interpretations of the event are different.
Our experience of an event is not the same as taking a picture of it. Our episodic memory represents
a record of our interpretations not literal copies of experienced events.

According to psychologist Daniel Schacter, this imperfection provides an important clue about
memory's function. A reconstructive memory, he says, occasionally produces false recollections,
because it does not store perfect copies of our past experiences. But to compensate for the loss of
perfection, it provides the mental flexibility we need to allow our interpretations of past events to be
recombined in novel ways, so that we are able to imagine and plan the future.
This ability to imagine and plan the future may be memory’s primary function.

Our memory is sufficiently flexible that we can memorize Paradise Lost verbatim if we want to, but it
takes a great deal of time and effort. Normally, we just need to understand John Milton's words to
have that information available for future use. Occasionally, you might misremember, but having a
flexible memory system enables us to travel mentally backward and forward in time.
Using Films to Tell Stories About Memory - Film: The Princess Bride

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says, that storytelling is a worldwide phenomenon, occurring in all
societies and cultures. It is he says, something our brains naturally do.

Good stories involve people facing difficult challenges and remembering these stories allows us to
imagine how we might respond to similar challenges ourselves. In a way, says psychologist Keith
Oakley, stories can function as our mind's flight simulator. Just as our brain networks become active
when presented with the sights, sounds, and movements of real life, these same networks become
active when we are engaged with a story.

бриши после Because we find it easy to learn from stories, I use a story format in this course. In
the next four parts of this course, I'm going to tell you stories about memory, illustrated by a variety
of films. The films will let you glimpse different aspects of memory through a character's
eyes. Watching a movie on a screen is like looking at life through a window. We know that much
more exists beyond the screen borders, as the film transports us out of our everyday lives into the
lives of its characters, often in another time and place.
Good stories, as the ancients discovered, are entertaining and informative.

Imperfect memory allows you to 'change' how you think. Memory isn't just about recalling facts - it
can be used to play out scenarios that didn't happen, changing key elements to predict different
outcomes. It's kind of a trade-off. Imperfect memory allows the mind to be flexable (inventing new
paths, predicting possible outcomes). A ridgid 'perfect' memory would hamper that ability - it wouldn't
be able to get beyond the facts to imagine different methods/outcomes. It would only be able to
regurgitate what had happened.
1.Question 1 Which one of the following is not a commonly used memory aid following brain injury?
notebook dictionary list wall calendar
2.Question 2 Which type of amnesia is believed to have a psychological origin? functional
3.Question 3 Which type of amnesia is believed a biological origin? organic
4.Question 4 Which type of memory enables us to maintain our acquired knowledge? semantic
5.Question 5 Which type of memory enables us to keep thoughts in mind? working
6.Question 6 Which type of memory enables us to drive a car? -procedural
7.Question 7 Which type of memory enables us to acquire and remember lifetime experiences?
episodic
8.Question 8 Which type of memory is temporary, used for short-term retention? working
9.Question 9 Which type of memory would you use in taking a friend to the movies?
working episodic procedural all of the above
10.Question 10 Which psychologist is credited with beginning the scientific study of memory?
Hermann Ebbinghaus
11.Question 11 What is episodic memory's primary function? to enable future planning
12.Question 12 Our episodic memory is best thought of as a collection of snapshots of past events filed
away in the brain. False
13.Question 13 Memories are attributions that we make about our mental experiences. True
14.Question 14 Our episodic memory is a record of our perceptual interpretations. True

Thank you for the Scientific American Mind article, Esha. Yes, there is no verified case of what
people call "photographic memory," and eidetic imagery is a rare form of very short-term memory,
not long-term memory. Dan Brown, like other story tellers, has invented a special ability that does
not exist as he describes it.
Fascinating question, Esha. Eidetic imagery is a real phenomena, but apparently found only in a
small percentage of children and it is of short duration – images lasting roughly 30 seconds or so. It
is a short lasting visual trace of a scene no longer present. People tend to think of eidetic imagery as
an exaggerated form of sensory memory that we all have (iconic and echoic memory) that normally
lasts for less than a second. This sensory memory helps us bridge the gap in film shots that pass by
frame-by-frame unnoticed and word-by-word as we read. We are not aware of the brief visual gaps
because of this very short sensory memory. This is really a biological process in our sensory
functioning, not a type of memory in the usual sense that we can monitor and control. Eidetic
imagery might seem attractive at first, but at least one study showed that kids with eidetic imagery
have trouble reading as their images last too long as their eyes scan the text. Fortunately, children
with eidetic imagery outgrow it.

Eidetic memory is the ability to see an object soon after you look away. For most people, the
image lasts mere seconds or less than one second. To get an idea of how well your brain
makes use of eidetic memory, look at an object and close your eyes, and see how long you
can still see the object in your mind's eye

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/i-developed-what-appears-to-be-a-
ph/?WT.mc_id=SA_FB_MB_EG

Making Long Lasting Memories

Memory’s main purpose is to facilitate future thinking. But to plan successful future actions, effective
strategies for learning and retention are needed. Some strategies are highly effective for producing
long lasting memories, others are not.
A Memory Worth Keeping (Film: After Life)
For a moment or so you feel what you felt before based on your episodic memory, your memory of
past experiences.

Film After Life, (Hirokazu Koreeda): Surprisingly the selected memories are often brief snippets
of time evoking subtle pleasurable sensations.

I've learned I was part of someone else's happiness. What a wonderful discovery.

Creating Long Lasting Memories (Film: Cast Away)

Unlike the characters in the film After Life, we can retain many experiences over our lifetime
remembering them again and again. Creating long lasting memories involves attending to the
meaning of an event, and relating it to things we already know. Attending the right way is critical for
long term memory.

Attention can influence memory. Limited attention yields limited memory.

How should we pay attention, if we want to create long lasting memories? To answer this question,
we can turn to people whose job requires an accurate memory.
Actors do not study them using rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with their lines
reciting them over and over until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over is called
MAINTENANCE REHEARSAL, and it is not an effective way to remember.

(Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition. The idea is that one will be able to
quickly recall the meaning of the material the more one repeats it)

ELABORATIVE REHEARSAL Psychologists Helga and Tony Noice surveyed groups of actors,
asking them how they learned their lines. Actors, they said, look for meaning in the script They try to
imagine their character in each scene, seeing it from the character's perspective, while relating their
lines to the character's background and mood. In trying to understand a character's motivation, the
lines are deeply analyzed so that later during the performance, the actor's deep understanding of
their character allows their lines to be remembered and spoken naturally, not recited from a
memorized script.
Actor Michael Caine has spoken about this learning process. He once said, you must be able to
stand there, not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor's face. Otherwise, for your next
line, you're not listening, and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously.

John Basinger was 58 years old, Paradise Lost, (John Milton) 9 years

I really began to listen to them. And every now and then, as the poem began to take shape in my
mind, an insight would come, an understanding, a delicious possibility.

A deep understanding what is called elaborative processing is effective for producing long term
memories. Elaborative rehearsal focuses attention on the meaning of an item or event, helping to
connect it to things we already know. These meaningful associations are important because
they will later serve as cues to help us remember.

Why would thinking about each word in terms of its survival value, produce better remembering than
focusing on each words number of syllables? Deciding whether words represent useful objects for
your survival, not only captures the meaning of the words it engages deep elaborative thinking
by making you attend to possible uses for those objects.

According to psychologist James Nairne, this type of thinking enhances our ability to remember
because over the long course of evolution our memory systems have been fine tuned to focus on
information whether finding food, finding a mate or avoiding predators that is necessary for our
survival.
CAST AWAY: He survived by forward thinking, future thinking, fashioning new uses for familiar
objects, using his memory to imagine and plan.
Facing the Future by Looking Backward (Film: Groundhog Day)

According to psychologists Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, navigating future scenarios by
combining past experiences in novel ways, is something we do every day.

Memory evolved to enable us to plan future action,

meaning that it operates both backward and forward in time.

After all, as the White Queen said to Alice, in Lewis Carroll's Through
the Looking Glass - it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

Yet without future thinking, how could you change your life if you were unhappy,
if all you could do was remember how badly everything turned out.

Groundhog Day: Today is tomorrow.

He realizes that if he wants his life to change, he must be the agent for change.

Deja vu is relatively common, occurring when a subtle sense of familiarity reminds us of something
from our past. Deja vecu is uncommon, resulting from a brain impairment that leads to a mistaken
belief of reliving the past.
Different Ways of Remembering (Film: Crash)

Over the past several decades, research has shown how we really can be influenced by past
experience without our conscious awareness. Remembering can be explicit or implicit.
Explicit and implicit remembering are distinguished by the presence or absence of conscious
awareness.
With implicit remembering, there is no conscious recollection. When a past experience influences
your current behavior without any awareness on your part, it is implicit remembering.

Sometimes implicit remembering can nudge us in surprisingly subtle ways.

When psychologists Lawrence Williams and John Bargh had people rate the psychological warmth
of a person who was previously described as a person with positive traits, after the people held a
cup of hot coffee or a glass of iced coffee, the researchers found that the people rated that person
as having a warmer personality if they previously held the hot drink.

In another study, Williams and Bargh found that after people connected two points on a graph that
were physically close together, they later rated their family relations as emotionally closer
than other people who previously connected graph points that were farther away.

In both examples, the physical dimension of a concept implicitly influenced its psychological
dimension.

Exposure to the physical concept of warmth or closeness was sufficient to arouse its psychological
meaning, thereby biasing a person's social judgement without that person's awareness.

Stereotypes about people can also be implicitly aroused.

Similarly, implicit prejudicial attitudes that are formed early in life can linger long after explicit
attitudes have become unbiased.
Where Do We Keep Our Memories
Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
When psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and Geoffrey Loftus presented 169 people with this choice in a
survey, 84% of them selected statement A (they believe that everything we learn is permanently
stored in memory), even though there is no scientific evidence to support it.

All three inaccurate.

Back in the 1950s, Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, concluded that the brain kept a
permanent record of a person's experiences. However, of the hundreds of patients who received this
procedure, these reports occurred less than 8% of the time, and sometimes they were more like
dreams than memories.

Memory is the brain's record of an event, but it involves connections among a group of brain
networks that initially fired together during learning, and fired together once more during
remembering.

Each of us can remember many experiences, even those from years ago. But this does not mean
that all of our experiences are permanently stored in the brain just waiting for the right cue for the
memory to pop out. Some experiences are permanently lost.
Such forgetting can serve an adaptive function by eliminating unnecessary clutter.

Memory erasure, it is based on the mistaken idea that individual memories can be precisely located
in the brain and destroyed.

People sometimes lose memory for large chunks of their past, but they never lose only those
memories involving a former lover. If a memory device could actually erase every trace of a specific
person, that device would have to locate and destroy every memory of that person. And this means
finding and erasing every object, place, smell, and thought associated with that person.
Because these associations involve multiple brain areas, the device would produce massive
forgetting due to massive brain damage.
Memory Champs, Mnemonics, and Savants (Film: Rain Man

savant noun a learned person, especially a distinguished scientist.

Memorists, seem to be able to remember large amounts of information quickly and effortlessly.
Yet, their superior memory is not based on exceptional intelligence. Exceptional memorizers, says
psychologist Anders Ericsson, are made, not born.

the method of locations, an ancient mnemonic device dating back over 2,000 years to classical
Greece. A person using the method of loci will typically use a set of familiar locations, such as the
rooms in their home or the buildings along a familiar route in their town. To remember a long list of
items, you would mentally walk through your town, visualizing the buildings along the way and
imagining each item that you wish to remember connected to a different building on your walk.

A person using the method of loci will typically use a set of familiar locations, such as the rooms in
their home or the buildings along a familiar route in their town. To remember a long list of items, you
would mentally walk through your town, visualizing the buildings along the way and imagining each
item that you wish to remember connected to a different building on your walk.
Remembering later is easy. You take a mental walk back through your town, picking up each item
that you left in each building. This mnemonic works because it provides a plan for remembering. It
tells you where to begin, how to proceed and when you're done.
Rain Man shows the costs and benefits of having a memory that psychologist
Darold Treffert describes as deep but exceedingly narrow.
Constructing mental pictures of things to remember and organizing them into an imaginary story was
essentially Chao Lu's procedure for memorizing thousands of digits of pi.

Rainman : Raymond's prodigious memory dazzles us in Rain Man, while also revealing how futile life
would be if we were unable to use this profound ability for future thinking. Raymond is a marvel at
memorization. But, he is unable to put it to any practical use. His memory feats are mystifying.
But any one of us with a laptop has access to more information than Raymond could acquire in a
lifetime.

Today, smart technology is changing how we use memory. Memorization is less important, while
knowing how to access and evaluate information is increasingly essential. The latest news, weather
forecast or film review is only a few clicks away. However, smart technology will not make memory
obsolete. As a source of readily available information, the Internet can make our memory more
powerful, helping us with future thinking.
1.Question
Why do people have difficulty drawing a common coin accurately from memory?
people give minimal attention to coins
2.Question 2
Maintenance rehearsal primarily involves which type of memory? working memory
3.Question 3
Which type of rehearsal involves associating new material to information already in long-term memory?
elaborative rehearsal
4.Question 4
Which of the following would involve elaborative rehearsal?
survival processing
deep understanding
forming associations
all of the above
5.Question 5
Planning for next week's meeting requires what type of thinking? future thinking
6.Question 6
The feeling of having experienced something before, but knowing that you have not, is called
___________. déjà vu
7.Question 7
Consciously recollecting the past is called ________. explicit remembering
8.Question 8
Being influenced by the past nonconsciously is called ________. implicit remembering
9.Question 9
Which of the following is true about stereotypes?
they can involve positive or negative believes
they can operate implicitly or explicitly
they can involve beliefs about race or gender
all of the above
10.Question 10
Do psychologists believe that all memories are permanently stored in the brain?
No, because there is no support for this belief
11.Question 11
What is the superior memory of a memorist based on?
memorists extensively practice remembering
12.Question 12
What is the superior memory of a savant based on?
their skill remains a mystery
13.Question 13
Memory is best thought of as an emergent property of the brain involving multiple brain areas.
True
14.Question 14
The method of loci is an ancient mnemonic system that dates back to ancient Greece.
True
Autobiographical Memories and Life Stories

Narrative Flashbacks - Film: The Kite Runner

Autobiographical memories are typically self referential, they involve you, interpersonal, they involve
you and other people, and emotional, they affected you positively or negatively. In remembering your
first romance, you probably recalled both episodic and semantic memories, by recalling where you
first met and the things you did together, along with the knowledge of your partners name, eye color,
and favorite music. Once this memory is triggered these autobiographical recollections spill forth,
and you become a memoirist, telling the part of your life story.

Writer Marcel Proust's memoir, A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, translated as, In Search of Lost
Time, provides a well-known example of this type of involuntary recal. Wow – 7 volumes!

Tell Me a Story About You - Film: Slumdog Millionaire

But in using a story narrative, our descriptions of a past event can be transformed. We may
unknowingly omit some unflattering details, embellish others and fill in gaps in our memory to
provide our narrative with coherence and meaning. These reconstructive narratives become our
autobiographical memories over time, and they are the life stories that we tell others. Although these
stories are imperfect records of our experiences, psychologist Dan McAdams says that they are not
self-flattering tall tales.
McAdams, we each seek to provide our scattered and often confusing experiences with a
sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives into stories. We are not telling ourselves
lies. Rather, we compose a heroic narrative of the self that illustrates essential truths about
ourselves.

In creating a life story, our personal memories are not self-serving fictions, stories that we made up,
attempting to make ourselves look good to others. As we gain new experiences, our life stories can
change over time. But they remain more fact than fiction, even though our memory is a
reconstruction of the past
Even though we structure our recollections in terms of a story narrative, these memories usually
provide a generally accurate record of our life experiences. These personal memories provide a
more or less faithful guide to our past because we remember the gist of our experiences well.

But, says psychologist says Martin Conway, they differ in terms of their timespans.

Experiences from the past can provide us with solutions to current problems,
and how those experiences help us to form an identity.
Emotion, Empathy, and Movies
- Film: Cinema Paradiso: The New Version

It is only a movie, yet we respond emotionally almost like real life.

Where does this empathy come from?

psychologist Keith Oakley's observation that stories function as our mind's flight simulator,
enabling us to glimpse life through another person's eyes and allowing us to imagine how we might
deal with similar situations in the future. An important part of this simulation process is empathy,
our ability to mirror the emotional experience of a character.
Mirror neurons in the brain may play an important role in this emotional experience. These special
neural circuits become active when we experience an emotion ourselves and when we observe
someone else acting emotionally. According to neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, these mirror neurons
may be the source of the empathy we feel while watching movies. They help us understand the story
by simulating in our brain the emotions that we see on the screen.

Through flashbacks we get to go back in time, experiencing with them the source of their emotionally
charged memories
Distant Memories - Film: Titanic

What's your earliest memory?

Our inability to remember experiences from early in life is called Infantile or Childhood Amnesia.
This form of amnesia is both normal and universal, likely resulting from several factors.
First, the brain is not fully developed at birth. Structures important for long-term memory, including
the frontal lobes and hippocampus, continue developing several years after birth.

Next, after the age of two, children dramatically increase their language skills and autobiographical
memory is closely tied to language development. People's earliest memories about objects often
follow by several months, the time when the names of those objects were learned.
First words seem to precede first memories.

Finally memory development is influenced by culture. One study showed that adult European
Americans produced earlier first memories, by more than a year, than similarly aged Taiwanese.
Cultural differences in child rearing, including how parents talk about the past with their children,
appear to influence early memory.

Yet, contrasting our difficulty in remembering experiences early in life is our facility in remembering
events from another time period.

What time period is especially memorable? Regardless of whether people are in their 20s or their
70s, they usually remember best those events that occurred during late adolescence and early
adulthood. Positive experiences from around age 20 are remembered well into old age in cultures all
over the world.

psychologist David Rubin

We remember events from this time especially well, not because we rehearsed them more but
rather, he says, because this time period involves major lifetime transitions producing changes in our
self image. In many different cultures, late adolescence and early adulthood mark
a time of major transition followed by a period of relative stability.
Culturally shared positive experiences typically occur during this time, events such as completing
school, starting a career, and getting married. But, unlike memories for positive life events,
memories for negative experiences are not linked to any lifetime period. People can become ill or
lose a loved one, for example, at any time and these events show no age related memory bump.

Unforgettable Moments
- Film: Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives
Are flashbulb memories a unique form of memory? Are they especially accurate and resistant to
forgetting over time? People put great confidence in these personal memories, but studies
consistently show that they often contain inaccuracies.
When people's memories are recorded right after a momentous event, such as the morning of the
September 11th attack, and compared months or years later with their current recollection of that
event, numerous changes are observed over time.

Yet, not every flashbulb memory is inaccurate. Studies have also shown that when people directly
experience a momentous event, such as personally surviving an earthquake, that event is accurately
remembered over time. Whereas other people, who saw the same event in the news, do show
memory changes. Accurate memory may also be found for other uniquely experienced events, such
as the birth of a child or the loss of a family member, something you deeply experienced just once.
These personal memories become resistant to change because they are frequently discussed and
rehearsed. Over time, these recollections of personally momentous events take on a story narrative,
but, as always, these recollections are narrative interpretations of the events we experienced.

Research reveals that the older the event to be recalled, the more we see ourselves as part of the
memory rather, than remembering the event from our original perspective.
For e.g., you more likely saw yourself as part of the birthday scene than the scene of yesterday's
dinner. But this is not how you originally perceived your long ago birthday. It's how you reconstructed
it from your memory.

This means that our autobiographical memories, even for personally momentous events, are
interpretations, not snapshots of those events. The term flashbulb memory is misleading, says
psychologist Ulric Neisser, because memories are not recordings. "Such memories," he said, "are
not so much momentary snapshots as enduring benchmarks. They’re places where we line up our
lives with the course of history and say, I was there.
Remember Me - Film: The Joy Luck Club

1.Question 1 Autobiographical memory involves which of the following aspects?

it is self-referential it is interpersonal it is emotional
all above
2.Question 2 Which of the following is not a type of autobiographical knowledge? general memory
3.Question 3 In telling our life stories, which of the following is not true?
we generally tell self-flattering stories
4.Question 4 In watching films, what might our mirror neurons do? help us feel empathy
5.Question 5 Which statement best describes infantile or childhood amnesia?
hard time remembering childhood before 2 years
6.Question 6 Which factor or factors contribute to infantile amnesia?
braind development cognitive thinking language culture
7.Question 7 What brain structure needed for memory is not fully developed at birth? hippocampus
8.Question 8 Positive experiences around what age are remembered especially well? around age of 20
9.Question 9 Negative experiences around what age are remembered especially well? no age
10.Question 10 What is the reminiscence bump? ennhanced memory around 20
11.Question 11 What are flashbulb memories? memory around momentous events
12.Question 12 Our life stories may change over time, but they remain more fact than fiction. true
13.Question 13 Infantile amnesia is not universally found across different world cultures. false
14.Question 14 Autobiographical memory is used to pass memories across generations. true
a handful of research studies done on how long students retain course information. Typically there is a
rapid loss of information immediately after a course has ended followed by a more gradual drop (but
not to zero) thereafter. Followup studies have shown that whatever information can be retained after
three months is usually relatively permanent – a condition described as "permastore."
My hunch is that the material on both autobiographical memory and memory changes in old age
would be better retained because that material was linked to emotion.
I'd say it's not the working memory because the knowledge students cram for an exam is not what's
happening at present which should be the definition of working memory, instead it looks more of
recent long-term memory to me, or semantic memory to be exact.
Correct. But I would add that it was poorly learned and practiced material that was never strongly
established in long-term memory. One of the best ways to establish strong LTM is to engage in
repeated self-testing over a period of time.
You need long-term memory to answer the exam questions.

when as person is in front an exam, he is using different types of memories, principally semantic, but
in this case, the person needs all things which he studied for the exam, the episodic, remaindind
differents aspect which it passed in the past, working because he need to have comprehension of
the question and proceduralin how the question need be to answer.
Correct, except for the procedural memory part. Procedural memory doesn't refer to "procedures" it
refers to skills or actions involving movement. Perhaps a poor title for this type of memory. In your
answer, following the procedure would involve using semantic memory (general knowledge).

The Martian and Cast Away are similar because both are variations on Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel,
Robinson Crusoe. Great stories of survival are compelling.

The long used rule of thumb for the capacity of working memory (the number of items you can
rehearse before forgetting occurs) has been 7 plus or mins 2 (i.e., 5 – 9 items). The capacity is not a
constant because it is influenced by factors such as the number of syllables in a verbal item. For
example, we can retain more short words (e.g., boy, car, dog, ...) than long words (e.g.,
hippopotamus, government, television, …) because we can mentally rehearse short words much
faster than long words. Within limits, the greater the speed of rehearsal, the greater the capacity of
our verbal working memory. The seven digit telephone number is a good example of technology
staying within our cognitive capacity.

n my earlier reply in the driving example I tried to clarify how we use different types of memory.
Reading is clearly an acquired skill. It involves working memory in holding on to the meaning of the
words as you read them to grasp the ideas therein, semantic memory to understand the words,
possible episodic memory if you are reminded of a similar experience from your past, and procedural
memory as, early on in life, you were taught to read by moving your eyes across the text, from left-
to-right or, in some languages, from right-to-left. There is a motor component to reading in eye
movements and their guidance, but we mainly think of reading as a cognitive skill.

Memory researchers distinguish between "field memories" (those recollections that we remember
from our original field of view) and "observer memories" (those recalls of past events in which we
see ourselves as part of the event. Recent memories tend to be field memories, while distant
memories are more typically observer memories. The observer memories demonstrate that our
recollections are interpretations of the past, not literal copies. Yet, these interpretations need not be
inaccurate. Field memories may be more accurate because they are more recent.
Understanding the Reality of Amnesia

Where Am I? - Film: Desperately Seeking Susan

Amnesia, meaning without memory, is a relatively rare disorder caused by multiple factors leading to
temporary or permanent impairment.

Amnesia can operate in two directions. It can make it hard to recall old memories or difficult to make
new ones.

When amnesia operates forward in time, it is called ANTEROGRADE AMNESIA.

Alternatively, if amnesia operates backward in time where a person loses memory for prior days,
weeks or years, the impairment is called RETROGRADE AMNESIA.

In real life, both forms of amnesia can occur in the same person - with some individuals showing
more anterograde than retrograde loss, and others showing the reverse.

When amnesia results from brain damage, it is called ORGANIC AMNESIA. It involves anterograde
loss or both anterograde and retrograde loss. When amnesia occurs without any known precipitating
brain damage, it is labelled FUNCTIONAL AMNESIA and it shows retrograde loss. Functional
amnesia has often been attributed to psychological or emotional trauma.

At people with amnesia other cognitive skills are usually maintained.

Their working, semantic and procedural memory systems still function. What is not working, is their
episodic memory, their memory for personal experiences.

For over a century, film characters have portrayed retrograde amnesia in ways that bear little
resemblance to reality.
During the 19th century psychologist Théodule Ribot in his pioneering studies of amnesia, observed
a link between head injuries and amnesia. But neither Ribot nor anyone else has ever found that a
person's lost memories could be recovered by a second concussion or a brain operation.

But while brain damage from a concussion can lead to amnesia, a second concussion never clears it
up. In fact, a second concussion can sometimes produce harmful brain swelling, leading to greater
brain damage, not recovery.
Organic Amnesia from Brain Injuries - Film: The Music Never Stopped

Organic amnesia refers to a group of brain- based memory disorders resulting from
multiple causes including concussions, strokes, infections, and tumors. People suffering from
organic amnesia typically experience trouble making new memories and may also find it hard to
remember old ones.

The term concussion can either mean collision or violent shaking. A COLLISION is a blow to the
head such as banging your head in a car crash that is severe enough to damage the brain's delicate
neural structures.

When Princess Diana was killed in a Paris car crash her body guard survived, but due to a severe
concussion he remembered nothing that led up to the crash.

VIOLENT SHAKING can produce the second type of concussion. In severe whiplash accidents if the
head is rapidly thrown back and forth it can damage the soft tissue of the brain by repeatedly
slamming it back and forth against the inside of the hard skull. Sometimes the brain damage is so
severe that organic amnesia is permanent. Other times if the damage is less severe, a slow recovery
may take place.

Concussions produce a variety of behavioral changes depending upon whether they are moderate
or severe.

Symptoms of moderate concussions include poor attention, slurred or incoherent speech,

disorientation, and problems of remembering.
More severe concussions have additional symptoms including persistent
headache, dizziness, fatigue, irritability, and an intolerance of bright light and loud noise.
The most severe concussions could produce seizures and cause a person to lapse in to a
coma.

A different kind of organic amnesia results when a STROKE changes blood flow to parts of our
brain. A stroke occurs when there is a blockage in blood flow or bleeding from a ruptured brain artery
that deprives brain cells of oxygen causing them to die.Lack of oxygen from proper blood flow can
result in permanent brain damage and possibly death. The initial symptoms of a stroke include
dizziness, weakness on one side of the body, and speech problems depending on the stroke's
location in the brain.

Survivors of strokes can have permanent physical and mental impairments including profound
anterograde amnesia. Sometimes, however, if there is only a temporary reduction in blood flow
there may be little lasting damage. One memory impairment believed to be related to a temporary
disruption in blood flow is called TRANSIENT GLOBAL AMNESIA OR TGA because it produces
transient, or temporary amnesia.

Most often striking people between 50 and 70 years old, TGA occurs suddenly producing
anterograde and retrograde amnesia that quickly resolves after a few days. People experiencing
TGA are aware of their memory problem. They know who they are. They can name their family and
friends, but they keep repeatedly asking others to explain what happened. During a TGA attack
there can be a temporary reduction in the blood supply to the brain's hippocampus a vital memory
structure. That reduction in blood flow has been caused in some cases by strenuous
exercise, psychological stress, and believe it or not sexual intercourse.

A VIRAL INFECTION such as herpes encephalitis can develop slowly, but cause permanent havoc
in the brain.

Case studay: The virus that produced anterograde and retrograde amnesia in Clive's episodic
memory spared those parts of his semantic and procedural memory involved with music.

A TUMOR is a growth of abnormal cells. MALIGNANT tumors in the brain are life-threatening
cancers that can destroy brain tissue. BENIGN tumors in the brain are not cancers, but as they
grow they can damage brain structures by putting pressure on neighboring tissue.

Whenever the hippocampus and related brain structures are damaged, a memory impairment
occurs. Depending upon the extent of the brain injury anterograde grade amnesia occurs with
people having a hard time forming new memories often with retrograde loss as people forget some
of their past. Amnesia is never so simple as the movies would have you believe.
Lost and Found Memories: Dissociative Amnesia - Film: The Return of
the Soldier

A failure of remembering, in which there is no evidence of a precipitating brain injury is called

FUNCTIONAL AMNESIA. Historically, this type of amnesia has been linked to an emotionally
traumatic experience.

What conditions give rise to functional amnesia?

Case studies suggest that after experiencing a highly stressful event such as public humiliation or
the death of a loved one, some individuals may forget that event and things related to it.
Trauma based amnesia is assumed if those people had no precipitation brain injuries.

However the lack of a precipitating brain injury does not mean that functional amnesia is an
emotional response to trauma. In some cases of functional amnesia, prior brain injuries have been
reported making it hard to specify the origin of this memory loss. Specifying how trauma produces
amnesia is a problem because traumatic events are most often remembered.
If a traumatic experience can produce amnesia, some process must produce the forgetting.

Two different accounts have been offered to explain traumatic forgetting. Some theorists have
attributed this forgetting to the idea of REPRESSION. The idea that a person's access to troubling
memories can be blocked from awareness by a psychological process that produces self-protective
forgetting. But finding compelling evidence for this process has proven difficult.

On the other hand, explaining traumatic forgetting with SUPPRESSION is also problematic.
If you try to suppress unpleasant thoughts by trying not to think about them, these attempts can have
the opposite effect of keeping them in mind.

The psychological and biological processes underlying functional amnesia remain undetermined.
What is known is that this type of amnesia is rare.
It can clear up spontaneously in days or weeks, with many people recovering their forgotten
memories.

Functional amnesia is clinically described as a dissociative disorder, an alteration of consciousness

that affects a person's memory and identity.

Dissociative disorders are rare, but dissociative experiences are relatively common.

No matter where your attention wandered during the drive, you maintained your sense of identity
and remembered your past.

For people with functional amnesia, their experience is different. Some of them can lose their
memory for only a portion of their past. Others can lose their identity along with their memory.
And still others might create multiple identities, each with different memories. These variations of
functional amnesia are called DISSOCIATIVE AMNESIA, DISSOCIATIVE FUGUE, AND
DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER.

In this lecture, I will focus on Dissociative Amnesia.People with Dissociative Amnesia retain their
identity, but forget a portion of their past related to some stressful event.

For e.g., During previous wars, for example, soldiers with no signs of head wounds have reported
retrograde memory loss after severe combat. Faking amnesia to avoid future combat is always a
possibility, as most soldiers find it hard to forget their war time experiences.
But anecdotes of forgetting by soldiers exist, even if their forgetting remains unexplained.
This phenomenon, initially called Shell-Shock in World War I, was the basis for Rebecca West's
novel, The Return of the Soldier Clive Wearing

Lost and Found Memories: Dissociative Fugue - Film: The Majestic

a person experiencing a dissociative fugue where memory loss is

linked to emotional stress and memory recovery can occur relatively quickly
people with dissociative fugue can make new memories
during amnesia, but they lose those memories after their amnesia resolves.

Dissociative Identity Disorder was once called Multiple Personality Disorder

because it is defined as the presence of two or more distinct identities with
different personalities and memories that alternately control a person's behavior.

Studies of people with dissociative identity disorder report that some identities may be aware of the
others, but one identity may have no memory for what the others experience.

This phenomenon is called INTERPERSONALITY AMNESIA.

Dissociative identity disorder is listed as a psychiatric disorder in the diagnostic manual of the
American Psychiatric Association. However this disorder remains controversial. Some psychologists
have questioned the reality of multiple personalities with different memories, while others hold that
this disorder is real, but, exceedingly rare.
Memory's Most Studied Mind - Film: Memento

The most famous case study in all of memory research involves a man named Henry Molaison.
Up until his death in 2008 at the age of 82, he was known only by his initials, HM.
Henry experienced epileptic seizures during childhood that worsened as he got older.
By the time he was 27, he was incapacitated by major seizures that left him unable to work or lead a
normal life. Because medicines could not control his seizures, Henry opted for brain surgery.
The goal of the newly developed surgery at that time was to find the area of Henry's brain that was
precipitating the convulsions and, providing that area did not serve a vital function, remove it.
The surgeon, unable to find any area showing abnormal electrical activity had a hunch that Henry's
seizures began deep inside his temporal lobes. During the operation, in 1953, he removed large
portions of Henry's hippocampus, as well as surrounding brain tissue from both temporal lobes.
Unfortunately for Henry, the vital importance of the hippocampus for making new memories was
unknown at that time.
adjective: egregious 1.outstandingly bad; shocking."egregious abuses of copyright"
2.ARCHAIC remarkably good.
standing out from the flock’

people sometimes show recovery providing their hippocampus is undamaged.

Recovery from anterograde amnesia can occur, although, says neuropsychologist Barbara Wilson,
it may only be partial after a lengthy period of rehabilitation.

1.Question 1
Which phrase best describes the meaning of amnesia?
memory loss
2.Question 2
Which type of amnesia is related to a precipitating brain injury? organic
3.Question 3
Which type of amnesia is not related to a precipitating brain injury?
4.Question 4
Which type of amnesia is characterized as difficulty remembering? retrograde
5.Question 5
Which type of amnesia is characterized as difficulty making new memories? anterograde
6.Question 6
Organic amnesia may be caused by which of the following factors? (stroke, infection, tumor,
concussion)
7.Question 7
Which of the following is not a symptom of a concussion? not feeling one side of the body
8.Question 8
Clive Wearing's amnesia produced major problems in which memory system? Episodic
9.Question 9
When the brain's hippocampus is damaged, which memory system is most impaired? episodic
10.Question 10
What is it called when retrograde amnesia linked to a stressful personal event? dissociative amnesia
11.Question 11
Which of the following characterizes a dissociative fugue> loss of identity, not remembering past,
12.Question 12
Dissociative disorders are rare, but dissociative experiences are relatively common. True
13.Question 13
Henry Molaison suffered temporary amnesia after his hippocampus was removed in an operation to
treat his epilepsy. False
14.Question 14
Any recovery from brain-based anterograde amnesia typically requires a lengthy period of
rehabilitation. True

My Memory Isn't What It Used to Be - Film: Cocoon

Forgetfulness does increase with age. Compared to young people, seniors are more
apt to fail to think of a particular word or blank on someone's name.
Occasional memory lapses can happen to any of us at any age.
They occur most often when we are tired, distracted, or under stress.
When elderly people experience them, they're commonly called senior moments

The worries are real and while memory can get worse with age, dementia is not inevitable.
I will show how memory changes as we age and provide up to date information on ways of
maintaining memory function.
.

A Troubling Turn: Mild Cognitive Impairment - Film: On Golden Pond

The ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Heraclitus argued that change is a constant of nature,
and all of us are subject to change. Physical changes in the body from rapid growth in childhood
to senescence in later years, are easily seen. Not so apparent, but no less real, are memory
changes in old age. While our memory systems do not decline across the board as we age,
episodic memory, our memory of personal experiences, is definitely impacted. Many studies show
that people around age 20 are better at remembering names, pictures, and stories than people aged
60 and older. Yet, there are individual differences. Some seniors can actually remember as well as
or better than younger adults. When does memory start to decline?
To some extent, it depends on how memory is tested.
Generally speaking, memory declines after the middle-age years. It occurs in cultures all over the
world, and it is based on neurological changes in the brain.

Shrinkage in the frontal lobes important for focusing attention leads to problems in inhibiting
competing stimuli such as tuning out extraneous conversations around you.

Shrinkage in the hippocampus, needed for long term memory, makes it harder to form new
memories, such as learning your way around a new city.

There is also a reduction in the connections between neurons called

synapses that conduct electrical chemical signals and a decrease in the supply of chemical
messengers called neurotransmitters that enable brain cells to communicate.

These changes in an aging brain are normal and do not lead to any serious memory impairment.

That only occurs if there are pathological changes in the brain. Given the brain's normally slow loss
of neural connections, it's been estimated that a healthy adult would have to live to be 130 years old
before showing any memory loss that resembled Alzheimer's disease.

In general, older adults are slower than younger people at learning and remembering complex tasks.

Compared to younger adults, older adults also have more difficulty eliminating distractions while
trying to pay attention. This ability is called inhibition, and it declines in later years. Young people are
better at inhibiting distractions.
Finally, although memory declines with age in countries around the world, the decline has been
shown to be greater in the United States than China, a country with a positive tradition about aging.
To the extent that western cultures harbor negative beliefs about aging.

Although these factors impact memory as we age, our memory systems are not uniformly impaired.
Depending on the particular system, our memory can get worse, stay the same, or it might even
improve. We use working memory to think about a limited amount of information for a short period of
time.

It takes intense concentration to mentally rearrange the five words alphabetically, and tasks that
make heavy demands on working memory will likely show an age-related decline. For seniors,
forgetting occurs before the words can be rearranged due to slowing of cognition.

We use episodic memory to remember past experiences for future use, and many studies show that
this memory declines with age. Recalling the past and remembering to perform future actions are
linked to areas of the brain, specifically the frontal lobes and hippocampus, that show shrinkage in
later years.
Semantic memory represents our acquired factual knowledge and holds up well over time.
This memory system provides a rationale for the wisdom that is frequently ascribed to seniors.
Although general knowledge can decrease after age 75, vocabulary knowledge is often greater for
older than younger adults and can remain stable till age 90. Seniors are often frustrated by one
aspect of semantic memory - remembering names. Seniors are prone to this problem, perhaps
because we have collected a lifetime of names in semantic memory.
Finally, we use procedural memory to learn and perform skilled actions, whether learning to type or
play a piano. With age comes a slowing of movement and cognition and seniors are slower than
young people in learning new skills, especially those with complex movements. Older adults can
master new skills, but they need more practice than younger adults.

Episodic memory gradually declines, working memory and procedure memory decline for complex
but not simple tasks. And semantic memory remains stable or might even improve, except for
remembering names. That gets harder in later years. All of these changes are normal.
If any decline is pronounced, it signals a possible pathological change that may have already begun
attacking the brain.

The first sign of trouble is when episodic memory noticeably slips.

A diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment, or MCI, may be made after a neurological exam for
seniors who still live independently, but show increased forgetfulness. They increasingly misplace
keys, lose track of bills, and have trouble shopping or preparing a meal.

A diagnosis of MCI is based on a clinical judgment involving a battery of memory tests.

A person's scores on these tests are compared to the scores of unimpaired people of the same age
and educational level as a person being tested for MCI. The test will show whether the person is
performing normally or poorer than his or her comparison group.

The tests should be repeated after several months to see if the person's memory problems are
remitting, stable, or getting worse.The tests are often conducted at a hospital memory clinic, and
they will measure a person's memory using a variety of tasks including immediate and delayed recall
of words, drawing the face of a clock showing a specific time, such as ten past nine, counting
backward from 100 by sevens, repeating complex sentences, and generating numbers of a
conceptual category such as naming as many different animals as you can in a short interval.

When memory testing is repeated after a few months, some seniors will score in the normal range, if
their earlier memory difficulties were due to mental or physical problems that have cleared up.
Still, others show little change if, for example, their memory problems are the result of a minor
stroke.

But for many seniors, their memory problems will only get worse, eventually leading to dementia.
Their mild cognitive impairment is commonly thought to be a pre-dementia phase of Alzheimer's
disease. For these people, their growing forgetfulness cannot be reduced by drugs or medical
treatments because no known treatment can reverse the pathological changes attacking the brain.
Strokes and Vascular Dementia - Film: Amour

Whenever blood flow in the brain is interrupted by either a clot or a ruptured vessel, brain cells
quickly die without oxygen resulting in brain damage. These disruptions in the brain’s blood supply
are called STROKES.
A brain scan can determine whether a stroke is the result of a blood clot or a broken vessel.
Drugs may break up a clot, while a broken vessel requires emergency surgery. The long-term effects
of a stroke are variable, depending on its location in the brain and how much damage it produced.

Strokes can produce various symptoms on the side of the body opposite the stroke's location in the
brain. These symptoms include weakness or numbness on one side, difficulty walking or seeing,
trouble speaking or understanding, or a severe headache. These symptoms can appear suddenly
after a major stroke, or gradually after a series of small strokes called infarcts, or silent strokes, that
can pass undetected.

Even a series of silent strokes can over time produce brain damage that is so extensive that a
person's mental state deteriorates resulting in profound and irreversible dementia.

What exactly is Dementia?

From its Latin origin Dementia means without mind. It is defined as the loss of intellectual function,
including memory, judgement, and abstract thinking due to disease or trauma to the brain in a
previously unimpaired person.

Dementia occurs most often in people age 80 and older, and their mental decline is far greater than
that produced by normal aging.

Dementia is a general medical term resulting from various assaults on the brain.
It can follow Parkinson's Disease, Huntington's Disease, HIV infection, and traumatic brain injury, but
this neurocognitive disorder more commonly occurs following strokes or Alzheimer's disease, and it
is almost always irreversible.

Dementia following a stroke is called VASCULAR DEMENTIA.

What is lost as vascular dementia advances?

Thinking is slowed, forgetfulness increases, speech becomes slurred, language and movement
problems worsen, inappropriate emotions, such as depression, take hold, and urinary incontinence
follows. Ultimately, a person with vascular Dementia can no longer function independently.
The brain damage underlying vascular dementia is permanent and irreversible. Similar to heart
disease, its risk factors include high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, smoking, and
obesity. The same steps that reduce the chances of heart disease, namely eating a healthy diet,
exercising, and maintaining a proper body weight can reduce the chances of a stroke.
Preventative measures are key because vascular dementia has no treatment or cure.
Although vascular dementia rarely occurs before age 70, it is the second leading cause of dementia
representing 10-20% of all cases in the United States and Europe and even more in Japan.
However, the leading cause of dementia, representing 60 to 80% of all cases, is the much dreaded
Alzheimer's disease.

The Insidious Invader: Alzheimer's Disease - Film: Away From Her

Alzheimer's disease takes its name from Alois Alzheimer, the German pathologist who first identified
it in 1906.Today this disease afflicts over 5 million people in the United States and 44 million people
worldwide. It increasingly attacks seniors from 5 to 10 percent of people in their 70s, to 25 percent or
more thereafter. And women, due to their longer lifespans and possibly hormonal changes after
menopause are at greater risk than men.

The National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association provide up-to-date information about
this disease online. According to their diagnostic guidelines, Alzheimer's disease is a type of
dementia that progresses in three distinct stages.
But, due to its insidious nature, it is difficult to determine when this disease actually develops.
It starts with everyday forgetfulness that gets progressively worse over time. During the initial pre-
clinical stage, people may show no memory impairment, even though the disease has already begun
attacking the brain. The first symptoms begin appearing in the second mild cognitive stage,
when people start experiencing trouble with tasks involving attention and memory. Noticeable
problems appear in the working, episodic, and semantic memory systems, sometimes years before
a diagnosis of Alzheimer's is made. In the mild cognitive stage people still remember important
personal events but forgetfulness increases. People misplace possessions, have difficulty managing
their money, and withdraw from friends and social events.
In the final stage, the Alzheimer's dementia stage, these problems steadily worsen. Patients find it
increasingly hard to communicate. They lose track of the date and day and personal experiences
become hard to remember. Alzheimer's patients will eventually forget the names of their spouse and
children and will no longer even recognize them. Familiar locations will be forgotten and
patients will get lost, wandering around places they formerly knew well.
Compared to her earlier prose as seen in this example from her 1958 novel, The Bell,
this gifted intellect wrote much shorter sentences in her final novel.

Toward the end, people with Alzheimer's become bedridden and

mute, no longer able to perform the most basic bodily functions.
They will require assistance for eating and using a toilet.
This decline occurs rapidly for some patients and more gradually for others,
with 10 years being the average lifespan from diagnosis.
But once the decline begins, it is irreversible.
Alzheimer's disease is associated with macroscopic and microscopic changes in the brain.
Macroscopically, the brain of an Alzheimer's patient shows dramatic shrinkage as brain cells stop
functioning, they whither and die. This cell loss, which typically begins in the hippocampus
before spreading to the frontal lobes and the other brain areas, helps to explain why memory
problems are an early symptom of this disease.

On a microscopic level two abnormalities occur in the brain cells of an Alzheimer's patient, amyloid
plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. The plaques are sticky protein fragments that form between
cells. The tangles are twisted protein strands inside a cell that stop nutrients from flowing. Together,
they lead to cell death.
The brain of a normally aging senior can contain these plaques and tangles, but they occur is
much greater mass in seniors with Alzheimer's Disease.
Today, researchers are searching for an Alzheimer's biomarker, an early biological sign that
a person has this disease. This biomarker could help identify people who might be helped by
possible treatments before the irreversible and massive loss of brain cells takes place. But finding an
effective treatment for Alzheimer's first requires understanding its neurological origin. One possibility
is that Alzheimer's is caused by the buildup of plaques and tangles in the brain leading to massive
cell death. Another possibility is that Alzheimer's is related to vascular dementia. Seniors may
become vulnerable to this disease by decreased blood flow in the brain from a major stroke or
a series of small strokes that lead to a progressive loss of brain cells. As yet, the cause or causes of
Alzheimer's remain unknown, even though a number of its risk factors have been identified.
These risk factors shown on the screen are characteristics that increase the likelihood of
Alzheimer's occurrence. The primary risk factor is old age, with the odds of getting this disease rising
sharply after 80. The type of Alzheimer's that occurs most frequently is called Late Onset
Alzheimer's because it occurs in old age. But there is a second more rare type that can occur much
earlier. Early Onset Alzheimer's can strike during a person's 40s or 50s, accounting for 5 to 10% of
all cases.
This disease can run in families if a genetic defect is passed on from parent to child.
Defective genes may also be implicated in some cases of late onset Alzheimer's.
But genes are not the whole story. Research on identical twins, people with identical genetic make
up, has found that if one twin developed late-onset Alzheimer's, the other twin had a 50% chance of
avoiding it.

At present, there is no cure and no permanent treatment for Alzheimer's disease. Drugs, such as
Aricept and Exelon, can temporarily reduce memory and thinking problems, but only during the
onset of this disease. Over time the need for assistance will increase, with more than 70% of
Alzheimer's patients receiving care at home from a family member.But for a family member, often an
elderly spouse, this can be a heavy burden, leading to physical and emotional exhaustion.
Eventually, as the Alzheimer patient loses more and more function, many will need full-time care in a
nursing home. Faced with an unplanned future, their elderly spouses are left to carry on alone.

brief surprising awakenings actually happen with Alzheimer's patients. They're temporary and rare,
lasting only minutes or hours, and no one knows why they occur, but music therapists working with
Alzheimer's patients have reported that music can occasionally trigger these episodes.

When Alzheimer's patients are given iPods loaded with their favorite music, surprising things
sometimes happen. One patient began singing a song, played by a 1940s band, while another
danced joyfully...

These moments imply that Alzheimer's patients retain some aspect of their humanity,
some sense of their self even while the disease is wrecking their brain.

Finally, although Alzheimer's patient can sometimes be angry or aggressive, they still recognized
kindness and are capable of love and affection. Yet when patients form new relationships, families
can become unsettled.
Maintaining Memory in Old Age - Film: The Bucket List

The things we can do to help maintain memory function as we age. Most of us will not suffer
dementia, but we will experience normal, age-related changes that are often frustrating or socially
embarrassing. With a little effort, we can offset some of these changes by taking a proactive
approach.
In my lecture on senior moments, I said that forgetting affects all of us, regardless of age.
We forget where we left our keys, we forget to get bread at the market, and we forget a doctors
appointment. Forgetting is the number one complaint about memory. Yet a few simple strategies can
help reduce this common annoyance.

First, put objects that you use everyday in their own place. An ideal location for keys is a bowl by the
door used to enter and leave your home.
Second, make reminder notes, including stick-ums, note cards, and cell phone messages to extend
your memory. A simple to-do list has long been popular because it works.

Finally, remembering is easier if you write things down or say them out loud. Instead of worrying
about whether you locked your door after you left home, you're more apt to remember if as you were
leaving you said, “I am locking the door.”

What about mental exercise as we age?

Most seniors know the cliche, use it or lose it, and wonder if staying mentally active can prevent or
delay any age related memory declines.
Consequently, some seniors spend hours solving crossword puzzles, playing bridge, or trying out
different brain training games on their computer.
Can these activities help maintain memory function?
Research on both young and old adults shows the same thing. When people practice a memory
task, their performances on that task will improve, but there is no overall memory enhancement.
Practice at playing bridge, can improve your bridge game, but it will not improve your memory in
general.

Psychologists Giles Einstein and Mark McDaniel have researched this issue and wrote this in their
book Memory Fitness. Focusing on just one activity does not seem to give the degree of mental
exercise needed to keep the brain fit. Instead, these researchers advise seniors to adopt an active
lifestyle, a lifestyle that incorporates different everyday activities, including social interactions with
family and friends, hobbies, and mentally challenging activities, such as learning a second language,
or taking courses online.

These things are important, but intellectual engagement is not enough. Seniors need physical
activity and this means cardiovascular exercise. Physical exercise elevates the heart rate and
increases blood flow to the brain. According to the American Heart Association, people should aim
for 30 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise five times a week.

One of the paradoxes of aging is that some seniors develop the plaques and tangles present in
Alzheimer's disease but they never show any serious memory impairment. A study of a group of
Catholic nuns, who agreed to brain autopsy after death, found that some nuns had these plaques
and tangles, but they showed only normal memory changes while alive. The elderly nuns who took
part in cognitively demanding activities were better able to maintain their memory function and
less likely to develop Alzheimer's than nuns less cognitively engaged. Why should this be?

According to neuropsychologist Yaakov Stern, people differ in their susceptibility to dementia

due to differences in two types of reserve capacity. First, says Stern, people differ in the size of their
brain. Some people have larger brains than others. Larger brains mean more neural connections
that can withstand more brain damage before showing any cognitive disruption. People with larger
brains have greater brain reserve than individuals with smaller brains.
Second, he says people differ in their capacity and efficiency in performing different cognitive tasks.
People with greater capacity and efficiency have greater cognitive reserve than others with less
capacity and efficiency. People with more brain or cognitive reserve may better withstand the
advance of Alzheimer's disease.

Researchers have recently identified a group of people in their 80s called Super Agers.
When given a series of standard memory tests, the Super Agers scored as well as or better than
people several decades younger. Brain scans showed that these Super Agers had a thicker cortex,
the brain's outer layer, important for cognitive functioning, and fewer plaques and tangles than other
seniors their age. For these people, memory did not decline in old age.

For most seniors, the many ones, without an especially thick cortex, maintaining cognitive function
requires a mentally engaging lifestyle that involves learning new activities, that requires sustained
effort, and are cognitively demanding.
How does lifestyle effect cognition in old age?
Research suggests that all of us have a zone of cognitive functioning that is governed by our age
and genetic background. We can function in the upper or lower portion of this zone depending on
our lifestyle. If we stay mentally active, maintain physical fitness by aerobic exercise, reduce chronic
stress, and eat a healthy diet, we can work to slow memory's decline. For each of us, lifestyle is a
matter of choice.
On turning 80, neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in a newspaper essay, “I do not think of old age as an
ever-grimmer time that one must somehow endure, but as a time of leisure, free to explore whatever
I wish and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”
Sacks sees old age as a time for both reflection and exploration by using his memory to look
backward and forward, a theme that I have stressed in this course.

Characters who provided important lessons about living with adversity and adding depth to
understanding of commitment and love, qualities that do not diminish with age.
That is why I described each of these films as a love story, and why, without memory, we cannot
have stories or love.
1. Occasional memory lapses, called senior moments, occur most often when?
2. Which type of testing involves testing the same people over a period of years?
3. Which type of testing involves testing different aged people at the same time?
4. Which factor can influence memory as we age?
5. Having difficulty blocking out extraneous conversations involves which factor?
6. Which type of memory could actually improve in old age?
7. Which items might be found in a test of mild cognitive impairment?
8. A stroke can be caused by which of the following?
9. When does dementia most often occur?
10. Which of the following are stages of Alzheimer's disease?
11. What is the primary risk factor for Alzheimer's disease?
12. Dementia brought on by stroke is called vascular dementia.
13. Early onset Alzheimer's disease rarely occurs before age 70.
14. Solving crossword puzzles every day will eventually lead to overall memory improvement.