Radiolab - Memory and Forgetting

go back to memory

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91569-memory-and-forgetting/

Remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process--it’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated, and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7-second memory.

Joe LeDoux: If you give a drug to a goldfish. It can't make a memory. Jonah Lehrer: It's a physical thing. Not simply an idea. A physical trace made of proteins. They know because they did a test on rats. Where they have a associating connection between a tone and a shock. But if you inject a chemical in the brain that prevents these neurons of forming a memory, they'll never remember. If you get to the memory on the moment it's made you can bust it up. But if the protein bridge is there already you can not change it.. That's what they thought. Karim Nader: What will happen if you give it when it's remembering? It forgets...

He thought the rat to be scared of two tones. To see if the drug is not just causing brain damage... It could erase one tones instead of two. So it could erase certain memories.. After this the Sunshine of the spotless mind came out as a film. After that they were looking if they could treat persons with PTSS syndrome. They tested this. If you give the drug, it works, the trauma get's less emotional.

Is it wrong to mess with memory? In a way that's therapy too. The reason the drug works.. It's because you re-creating a memory every time you thin of this. The act of remembering is an act of creation. Every time you remember something, you chancing the memory a little bit. You think you remember something from 30 years ago but actually you are reinterpreting that memory in the light of today. All you got is the most recent recollection. If you suddenly think about a memory 30 years later, say through a cue. This memory is more honest than if you think about something for 30 years every day. Jadine Dudai: "The safest memory is a memory of someone with amnesia; If you have a memory. You use it. And you're more likely to change it."

Dr. Elizabeth Loftus: In research they alter the memory of a simulated events. They also found out that you can plant a memory. For example that you were lost for an extended period of time. We told them that we had talked to their parents etc. They would start with a true story, etc etc etc.. Somewhere in the middle they would slip in the line. In that particular story.. A quarter of the subjects adopted it as their own memory. What is happening; people take the image of an actual shopping center, and image of an actual family member out of these bits and pieces.

When you're remembering something, it get's unstable. That's the moment where people things could slip in. So if people question you about a certain event, it's possible that they add something.

Proustian rope from heaven.

REMEMBERING MEDIUMS Adding Memory: Andrei Codrescu (as read on radiolab)

The other day, a friend of mine was explaining how she had to move these pixels around her computer and had to add twenty megabytes of memory to handle the operation. I had the disquieting thought that all this memory she was adding had to come from somewhere. Maybe it was coming from me, because I couldn’t remember a thing that day. And then it became blindingly obvious: all the memory that everybody keeps adding to their computers comes from people. Nobody can remember a damn thing. Every time somebody adds some memory to their machine, thousands of people forget everything they knew. Americans are singularly devoid of memory these days. We don’t remember where we came from, who raised us, when our wars occurred, or what happened last year, last month, or even last week. Schoolchildren remember practically nothing. I take the Greyhound bus every week, and I swear half the riders don’t know where they got on or where they are supposed to get off. The explanation is simple: computer companies are stealing human memory to stuff their hard drives. Greyhound, I believe, has some kind of contract with IBM to steal the memory of everyone riding the bus. They are probably connected by a cable or something: every hundred miles, poof, another five hundred megabytes get sucked out of the passengers’ brains. The computers’ thirst for memory is bottomless: the more they suck, the more they need. Eventually, we will all be walking around with a glazed look in our eyes, trying to figure out who it is we live with. Then we’ll forget our names and addresses, and we’ll just be milling around trying to remember them. The only thing visible about us will be these cables sticking out of our behinds, feeding the scraps of our memory to Computer Central somewhere in Oblivion, U.S.A. I think it’s time for all these memory-sucking companies to start some kind of system to feed and shelter us when we forget how to eat, walk, and sleep.