Are All Memories Alike? - Cultural Differences

I found this article to be very interesting because I had never really thought on the topic of cultural differences in memory. I read the article and in my opinion, it is a very interesting fact to know that there are differences in memory within cultures like for example they say in the article that maybe a North Korean old guy could never remember something before age 4, but maybe a "gringo" might remember anything from 4 years and below because of what Freud called "childhood-amnesia". I learned a lot in this article because sometimes you are able to know something without really thinking about it and this is what happened to me when I was reading the article. there were some parts that I felt like i was hearing the same story I had heard from someone else before but never really sat down and thought about it really.

Are all Memories Alike? - Gender Differences

Based on the article, I learned that in fact gender differences favour women because it says that some scientists researched this and found out that women are better than men to remember everyday events. Specific results indicated that women excelled in verbal episodic memory tasks, such as remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events, and men outperformed women in remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information, known as visuospatial processing. For example the results ay thata a man would be more fast to find his way out in the woods. 
Also, the results say that women would remember better such things as locations of car keys or something like that. Also, using the information given we can see that women are better to remember things like faces or names and especially those of females. 
To determine this particular finding, the psychologists presented three groups of participants with black and white pictures of hairless, androgynous faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The findings indicate that women were able to remember the androgynous faces presented as female more accurately than the androgynous faces presented as male.

The Placebo Effect - is it real or just imagined?

In my opinion, the Placebo Effect is a special occasion when you are given a "Placebo" pill which means that the pill is fake. The pill can simply be sugar or anything else that wont make your pain go away, but once you take the pill, your brain starts to think that you are going to feel better because you already drank a pill for it. That is how the placebo effect works. In the class we have learned many different cases in which Placebo pills have worked for a lot of people that have a really messed up situation. For example, there can be fake operations in which the whole procedure of sleeping the person and cutting you open is done, and all of a sudden the person starts feeling better because he thinks that he had the surgery already.

Henry Beecher is a famous psychologist that made a paper called the Powerful Placebo and it was really an impact. While this paper did not introduce the idea of placebo reactions, its importance was that it stressed—for the first time—the necessity of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. In his 1955 paper, Beecher only speaks of placebo effects on specific occasions when he is contrasting them with drug effects.


These studies have problems like for example, the people that are being tested might think that they are being fooled when they are told that they were taking placebo pills. 
In my opinion, I think that Placebo pills have been a great discovery because maybe with these pills some doctors can cure incredible cure-free diseases and it is a great invention!

Alzheimer´s Disease

I have read the first article on alzheimer and it has really shocked me that more than 5 million Americans currently suffer from alzheimer´s disease and it will keep on growing and it will never stop just like AIDS.
It is funny how each and every second that passes there are more and more people dying because of smoking problems or more people are being born with each second that passes.

 But also, every second that passes there is a new person that is diagnosed with Alzheimers disease and the ugly part about this is that we can not do anything to prevent having it or to cure the sickness.

In my personal opinion, Alzheimer´s is one of the most cruel and devastating deaths because it makes you suffer a lot and its not only the diagnosed person that suffers: it is also the person´s family that suffers because of it´s symptoms. If a cure is not found fast for this sickness, it will become a really menace to the world just like yellow fever and small pox sometime killed many people. To beat this sickness, first we have to recruit volunteers to join a study that can help identify who is at greatest risk of developing the condition. The results could paint a clearer picture of the factors that put people in danger. People have searched for the answer but have failed to find it.

Alzheimer´s most casually strikes on old people and more women than men.

Articles on Memory

First Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081028103111.htm
- Neuroscientists at The University of Queensland have discovered a new way to explain how emotional events can sometimes lead to disturbing long term memories.
- This article explains how some very strong emotional events can lead to disturbing long term memories.
-Some examples in real life are like someone that was raped when she was young and maybe she can be like traumatized by that event that will disturb her for the rest of her life.


Second Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429091806.htm
- The article is about this: The human brain stores some kinds of memories for a lifetime. But when our eyes are open and looking at things, our gray matter also creates temporary memories that help us process complex tasks during the few seconds these visual memories exist. For decades, scientists have held that such short-term memories don’t suddenly disappear, but grow gradually more imprecise over the course of several seconds.
-It is a very interesting article and to be honest, I had not given it a lot of thought and it now is opening my eyes to a greater reality.
- Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have found just the opposite.


Third Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070815105026.htm
-This article is explaining how the memories that you try to forget are the harder ones to lose and it is very interesting and it has happened to me on many occasions.
-An example is when I was making my Confirmacion about two years ago, at the same time Real Madrid was playing against Barcelona and i hate Barcelona with all my heart and they won 6-2 and that is the memory that i have tried to forget the most but I can never seem to let it go.

What is Memory? -How Does it Work?

1. The ability to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased. It refers to items detected by the sensory receptors which are retained temporarily in the sensory registers and which have a large capacity for unprocessed information but are only able to hold accurate images of sensory information momentarily.
2. For example, every time I smell Old Spice it reminds me of big bear hugs from my grandfather.
3. Exactly how long information can be stored in sensory memory differs according to source of the sensory information being remembered:

• iconic memory (visual sensory memory) - less than one second
• echoic memory (auditory sensory memory) - less than four seconds

4. Short term memory is the capacity to hold a small amount of information in mind. The duration of short term memory is believed to be in order of seconds.

5. "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" is one of the most highly cited papers in psychology.  It was published in 1956 by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller.

6. Chunking is taking 'chunks' of information and grouping them all together.

7. The capacity of short-term memory is more or less constant (from five to nine chunks of meaningful information)

8.Short-term memory is believed to rely mostly on an acoustic code for storing.

9. The issue with duration in long-term memory relates to recall and forgetting. It is impossible to measure and may be limitless. The brains ability to store information is greater than the worlds most powerful computer memory.

10. Memory starts as stimuli and if we don't think a lot about something, then it becomes a short term memory but if we give it a lot of thought, then it becomes a long term memory.

11.  1. The sensory stores are sensory systems, not memory systems as most people think of the term "memory."

      2. The three-box model suggests that there is nothing in between short-term and long-term memory. However, evidence shows that information can reside somewhere between the extremes of active attention and long-term storage. Memories can be "warmed up" but outside of attention. In other words, intermediate levels of activation are possible.

     3. The three-box model implies that there is just one short-term system and just one long-term system. In reality, there are many memory systems operating in parallel (for example, different systems for vision, language, and odor memory). Each has short-term and long-term operations.

12. -Organization -Distinctiveness -Effort -Elaboration 

13. The process of repeatedly thinking or talking about the information. 

- For example when I am trying to remember my vocabulary words I just think and say many times the word so that it stays in my mind.

14. In contrast to maintenance rehearsal, which involves simple rote repetition, elaborative rehearsal involves deep sematic processing of a to-be-remembered item resulting in the production of durable memories.

- For example Mr Dougherty told us that he remembers his parents phone number by elaborative rehearsal because he remembers it within pieces of information like for example 987-678-068

15.  Craik and Lockhart (1972

Response to Video

I learned a lot on the video that we watched in class about the various memory issues. Especially, on the last case of the old dude that almost died and that ran everyday. That part of the video was the most sad of all the examples given in the video because we got to hear and watch his wife (think she was his wife) and she sounded very sad saying that he was a totally different person from the person she had married. I now know that memory is the best gift we have and that we do it unconsciously and we do not even think about it but if we think what we would be if we did not have any memory, our life would be horrible! Memory is what builds each and every characteristic of our life and now I feel really scared that something may happen to me and I could lose my memory! Thanks a lot Mr. Dougherty :(