BOOOM!

All semester I have been going crazy worrying if I will get to be an RA and an OA over the summer. This week I got great news. I got both jobs and yet somehow my brain still isn't working properly. I kept saying to myself all semester once you find out about the jobs, you;ll be able to really focus in on your classes. Yeah well, I was wrong. I have a huge project due tomorrow, and I have it about half way finished, but the whole thing has been a struggle because every time I sit down to work on it some idea for a program for next year or an idea for summer preschool wiggles its way into my skull and won't leave me alone unless I write it down somewhere. I think this must be what it would be like to have ADD. Having to block an overly excited brain is extremely difficult, and I am really glad that this is not my every day functioning level because i would never get ANYTHING done! I don't think it really helps that three of my classes this semester are really stupid and that all the stupid ones meet on Monday-Wednesday-Friday afternoons which makes them extremely dull long afternoons. Well, I feel better. Off to more homework.

Muscle Memory part 2

There is however, a point where even muscle memory fails. I have seen this multiple times... again in the context of music.

I am in the Purdue Christmas Show, and after practicing songs a seemingly endless amount of times, I finlly royally screwed one up. THis song is my favorite song, and the part I messed up was dmittedly the hardest, but also the part of the song that I had practiced the most. So...there was basiclly no reason for me to screw it up.

After I missed my part so much that I threw off the whole rest of the song for about five seconds (which felt like an hour) I couldn't find my part again. It took at least another fifteen seconds of hard listening to get back into the song. Why was it so difficult to rejion a song that I can play without thinking about?

This is where other factors have to be taken into account in the equation. The performance was the third of the day. Also, the president of the university and our director's parents were in the audience. So the great need not to mess up was completely over ridden by nerves and there goes a great song flying out the window.

Muscle Memory part 1

Again, again, again.....

There is just something amazing about repetition. The more you do something the easier it gets. The principle of muscle memory applies to everything from typing to playing a song you have not played in six months on the piano by memory. There is just a point where your brain kicks off and some kind of unconscious memory kicks in.

I can literally sit down at a piano and play songs from memory with my eyes shut. You can't really attribute this to memoriztion of the notes because if you asked me what note each of the songs started with, I don't honestly think I could tell you. It is just that after playing my favorite songs over and over and over again, my fingers know exctly when and where they need to be.

How do my fingers know without my explictly telling them where to go? The answer to this is actually quite simple. Each action is completed by a specific sequence of nerve firings in the brain, and the more a pathway of firings is used, the more natural it becomes. This is n amazing phenomenon, but as ever, the human body is far from perfect....

To be continued...

Multiple Personality Disorder part 2 of 2

Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) is maladaptive because of a number of traits of the disorder. First of all, personalities are rarely aware of what the other personalities know/do which makes it difficult on the other personalities when they switch. For example with Julie, when the Marlena personality came out, she would often go out with strange guys, get scared, and retreat inside leaving Julie (who didn’t get herself into the situation) to sort out the mess. When she finds herself in these situations, Julie feels lost confused and is often in some degree of danger. The other personalities can also make it difficult to work a regular job. Julie had a rough time trying to get the younger personalities from coming out and playing or crying while she was at work because she obviously can’t suddenly sit down on the floor and play with a toy.

MPD is also very exhausting for people around the person. Since people with MPD do not remember (essentially black out) when the other personalities come out, they often do not sleep very much. The relations of people with MPD will often get phone calls in the middle of the night because one of the personalities is having a bad night or just wants to talk.

Another ‘side effect’ of MPD is that the main personality rarely knows about the others, and if any of the other personalities know about the others, they will not seek treatment because they do not want to go away. MPD is often misdiagnosed partially because many psychologists do not believe in its existence, and the symptoms are often difficult to see in a one hour therapy session.

MPD is also very difficult to treat because the treatment involves the therapist spending time with each of the individual personalities and figuring out why they are there and getting them to leave or be absorbed by the dominant personality. This is a very time consuming and difficult process which can take a MPD specialist years to complete successfully.

Multiple Personality Disorder part 1 of 2

MPD is usually developed as a defense mechanism in people who were abused as children. They develop different personalities to deal with different situations. This is an extremely rare disorder in that less than .1% of the population develop MPD in their lifetime. MPD is an amazing defense mechanism in some respects, and very maladaptive in others.

People with MPD can have an essentially limitless number of personalities as they say ‘walking around in their head’ in an attempt to deal with their life situation. Some people merely split themselves in two like Jack/Tyler in Fight Club, and others can develop twenty or more distinct personalities like the character Julie in the book 9 Highland Road.

Jack/Tyler was bored with his life and didn’t like being what he saw as a boring pacifist so he created Tyler to make himself more masculine/spice up his life. This is the stereotype that most people believe MPD conforms to. This Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde persona who takes drastic shifts form one personality extreme to the other when the situation calls for it is not the typical MPD case.

Julie in 9 Highland Road is much more standard. Julie has fifteen personalities ranging in age from three to about twenty five. She created them to deal with her very abusive childhood, and they range in personality from promiscuous seventeen year old Marlina to three year old happy-go-lucky Didi to twenty something Abigail who keeps everyone in line.

All of these personalities keep the person from having to deal with the terrible parts of their life. They are about as close to a repressed memory as a person can truly get, but there are some really bad consequences that go along with having MPD.

Continued…

Repressed memory accuracy

Many people are sitting in jail for crimes they did not commit because of recovered memory testimony. In order for memories to need to be recovered, they first need to be repressed. Repressed memories are gone. Memories can be suppressed in that a person can try not to think about a horrible thing so that they can function normally in every day life, but a memory can never truly be repressed (the definition of a repressed memory is that the generally negative experience effects a person’s actions/feelings and that the person would not be able to tell someone why they do something or feel a certain way, just that they do.)

‘Repressed memories’ are recovered through the process of hypnosis. Many people, including the justice system of the United States believe that recovered memories are extremely accurate because of the conviction with which people stand by their memories. Sadly, these memories have basically been planted in their heads without their therapist really meaning to plant them. A patient can go to therapy, and if a therapist asks enough or they talk about the possibility enough, anyone will come up with a possible scenario in their head. After talking about the scenario enough, people will actually believe that this event really happened to them.

This phenomenon is especially visible in children. If a child hears a story enough (especially if they are told the story happened to them), they will not remember if it is an actual memory or if it is just the story they have heard so many times. This is where trials turn into witch hunts. Especially in the case of statutory rape/child abuse, many people question children over the time period before trials about what happened, and if they talk about it enough, they can essentially plant memories in the children’s heads.

I’m not saying that all the time people are lying in cases that use repressed memory testimony, just that people don’t suddenly remember terrible ordeals. That is just not how memory works.

World's smartest man.

In the world of memory, Joshua Foer is a bit of a legend.

Any one who can,

"Memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour. Memorize the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards. Memorize 99 names and faces and recall them in 20 minutes. Memorize 50-line unpublished poems."

deserves a spot of recognition as the Memory Champion of the United States. After months of practice and training in the fine art of memory, Foer, the author of a book on memory, was ready to take on the challenge to be the world's smartest man.

Foer used an interesting technique to beat a United States record by memorizing a shuffled deck o fcards in one minute and forty seconds. Here is what he did:

"in order to be successful in remembering, he needed to assign each bit of information he is given an image. This image would then be placed in a section of your brain called the memory palace. Within the memory palace is a series of rooms, and in order to retrieve the information you have learned, you walk through the palace and go in each room, gathering information."

This is very similar to the concept that if you need to memorize a list of unrelated words, the best way to do so is to make up story about them. Foer is doing just that except that the story is merely a picture that stores his memories.

While few of us will ever have to memorize a deck of cards, this technique reminded me of something my Mom taught me to do to avoid losing things. She said, "put the object that you always lose down (like your keys or your right shoe) and look at it for a second. Make it as big as a house in your mind and say…the giant keys are on top of the stereo." This technique has always worked wonders for me because the second you say to yourself, "where are my keys," you get the image of this giant set of keys squashing the stereo. Foer's model obviously worked for him since he is the new "Smartest Man" in the United States.

Click here to view the originl article on Joshua Foer's amazing accomplishment.

Unconscious routines

This blog is a classic example of how a deadline can remind a person to do something. I generally forget about this assignment from one end of the week to the next (unless I think of a really great topic idea), but when it's Saturday morning, and it is time to actually sit down and write it, I suddenly remember that I have to write 750 words and I get on it.

Deadlines that are consistent are also part of a schedule that we all get used to. I sometimes manage to walk across campus from one class to another with out really realizing where I am going or how I am getting there. I don't need the room numbers after I have been to a class once or twice. In fact, if you asked me for my own address right now, I couldn't tell you what my room number is because I know how to get to my room…so why would I need to know the number?

Then again, if I sat down in the middle of the week and listed out all the things I had to do over the weekend, this blog would be on the list, and if I needed my room number for something, I could probably come up with the number (459).

The moral of this story…

When you see something or do something all the time, you may not consciously know the information or what you need to do, but you will definitely remember when you need to.

Can their craziness affect memory?

Psychology at this point is based heavily on guess work, so any studies that can provide conclusive evidence are greatly needed.

This link is to a study which is trying to determine the effects of having children on memory. This is an interesting topic because not only will it help explain why people lose their minds when they have children, it cnalso be applied to "the think zone."

This study is relevant because it basically studies how having to care for/think about other human beings affects people's memories. This study makes the huge assumption that parent's minds will be more cluttered than the minds of non-parents.

This assumption, while interesting and plausible, is not necessarily correct. Non-parents are more likely to have highly demanding jobs and therefore the possibility of just as much to think about. They do though have more time to think about their own lives because they do not have to deal with kids all the time.

To cut to the chase, if you have completed the 12th grade, you are eligible to participate in this study. I completed the study in about a minute. You only have until Thursday November 20th to help further the psychological community. So please take a minute out of your day.

Whether I like the Weather.

What do you say when you are bundling up on the way out of the house into sub zero weather? I always say, "I can't wait for it to warm up."

What do you say when you are sweating your butt off sitting in little more than your underware drinking Lemonade in the sweltering heat of July? I usually say, "When is it going to finally cool down?"

We all know in the back of our minds that it never stays that very ideal temperature of 70 degrees for more than like A SECOND, but somehow, many people just want to hurry along the seasons.

We forget that it is incredibly miserable on either extreme of the weather spectrum, but also, we always want it to be the other season. I was shocked how fast this happened this year. Almost immediately (on the first 20 degree day after a string of 70 degree days) I started hearing people complaining about how cold it was. But just days before, they had all been complaining about the insane heat. For some reason, people could not just appreciate the sting of the wind on their face even for one day because we know that it's only going to get colder and more biting. The effect is less noticable in the spring than in the fall because people love going outside without their coat, mittens, scarf, hat, and long underwear for the first time in months, but we do eventually forget the novelty and get sick of the heat.

I can't remember...

When I sat down to write for the first couple of weeks of this class, ideas just flowed and everything sounded new and fun, but I have started brain torming recently, and hit a major speed bump. After this many entries, I feel like I am repeating myself. It is getting hard to remember all of the posts, and to keep them all straight.

The organization of this blog itself doesn't help. It is by no means easy to look at a comprehensive list of all blogs. They are listed by month, and you can't really change how you can look at the blog history.

Basically, my memory has finally begun to fail me on this project. I am largely out of ideas and basically exhausted.

Is this too much?

According to the recent article, Surrogate Memory,Pal Pilots can be a huge help to people suffering from sever memory impairments.

People who have suffered strokes, have alzheimer's, or any other cognitive limitation can benefit from the modified palm pilot developed at Baycrest. At Baycrest, people with cognitive impairment take lessons in how to use their palm pilot until they (with their poor memories) can no longer maybe remember how they learned how to use the machine, but they still know how to use it. This is called procedural memory, and works sort of like riding a bike or walking.

The people then need to get in the habit of putting everything they need to do into their palm pilot. The reminders can be easily programmed at any time for any time, and then, when it is time for the person to do something, the palm pilot beeps and they can look at what they need to do.

Great right... Yeah, until they make a mistake. If a person says, "I don't have time right now, I'll put the event in later" chances are they will forget about putting the event in their palm pilot, and thus forget the event. Also, what happens when the person is told drive to an appointment, and they get in the car and can't remember what they did with their keys, or in the case of Alzheimer's Disease, they can't remember what they need to start the car. Then in the process of looking for their keys, they have to wander the house, and maybe bump into a book they were reading and just sit down and read never thinking again about the appointment. And what happens when they look at the date the doctor wrote on the appointment reminder card and put the appointment on say the 16th instead of the 6th?

Palm Pilots are a step above an day planner because they can actually remind you when something needs to happen, but I wonder how effective they would be for someone with severe cognitive impairment. There are so many steps in between being told that you have a doctor's appointment and actually arriving there that too many things can go wrong.

Clutter

When there are so many things happening in a person’s life that they can’t keep them straight, I call that brain clutter. Sometime, classes mush together until you accidently don’t go to class because you remember two of your teachers saying class was canceled, but don’t realize until the next class that the one you showed up for is the one that is canceled, not the one you skipped. OOPS!

The best way to get rid of brain clutter is to do less, but since we can’t very well do that, it is important to make it as easy on your brain. Try to focus on one task at a time, and once it is completed, start on the next one. I have determined that trying to plan ahead too often is also a sure fire way to make your head blow off. If you constantly plan ahead, you have a million projects/ideas/goals that all float freely around in your head. Don’t let them in, and your brain will function much better. Don't over think things.

On the tip of your tongue

While writing, a very common phenomenon is that you know the exact definition of the word you are looking for, but cannot get the exact word out of your mouth. You babble nonsense words to yourself that start with the letter you think the perfect word starts with in the hopes that you will stumble on the correct sound to trigger your memory of the perfect word.

You know that there is only one perfect word that could possibly make your paper awesome, so you sit there talking to yourself trying to find it. When your brain is insufficient, and you feel like you are banging your head on the wall, you ask your roommate, “what is the word that means _____and sounds like ____... Help me." The next step is going to the thesaurus and trying to look up the words that are close, but that rarely works either.

The really frustrating thing is that after you choose the closest word, and after you have printed out the paper, while you are standing in front of the printer or putting the staple in the top left hand corner, you remember the word and smack yourself in the head and forget about it because in the end, the other word got the job done just the same.

Drawing a Blank

Have you ever been thinking about something and then suddenly, the precious little thought that was running through your head is frustratingly GONE! It’s like waking up from a dream and knowing that it was a wonderful dream, but having no idea what about the dream made you so happy.

There are many possible explanations for why these thoughts flee our heads. It could be because you suddenly think of something else on a tangent off of the original thought that drives the original thought out of your head. I was recently working on a group project, and we were trying to cover so many different topics all right after one another that we were getting very confused. A couple of times, one of us would say something that we thought should be included in the paper, and then someone would ask us to repeat the sentence and the recurring response was, “I honestly can’t remember what I just said…What are we talking about again?”

We were trying to do too much too quickly, and it all got jumbled together in one big confused thought. After a while, we would have to take a break because after 6 hours of working with the same group of people, everybody’s brains feel like mush, and mush is really bad at math.

Thinking about thinking 3 of 3

There is a movie about wanting to forget things called, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." It is a tragic movie about ruined relationships and people who want to forget the happiest times of their lives because they had been taken away from them and now made them sad to remember.

We are all shaped by our experiences (good, bad or otherwise) and if we were just able to forget of have memories erased, we would all lose the valuable lessons we spent that time learning. There is always something that you take away from a situation no matter how terrible or hopeless the situation looks.
There is one instance that pops into my mind when I think of things that I wish hadn't happened. A bunch of friends and I were in France and we were in this artist's village. We had just gotten lunch and then suddenly, we were surrounded by a bunch of guys. They said they wanted to make us wish bracelets, and that they were free, so we all said yes, they were free right…

Wrong! When they were done making the bracelets, they said now they would like a small donation. I would have been willing to give them a euro or two because the bracelet was interesting, but they kept pushing. Saying stuff like "that's all…" and there were tons of them, and I think between all of us, they got like fifty dollars because we wanted them to leave us alone.

It was a horribly frightening experience that I would love to forget, but you know what it did for me, I am really good at getting rid of telemarketers and walking right past people handing out fliers on the street and politely but firmly refusing the little piece of paper that I'm just going to throw out anyway.

So, as unpleasant as some experiences may seem at the time, you will realize that it is all for the best when you think about what you learned and not what you lost.

Thinking about thinking 2 of 3

A recent article, "Scientists find way to erase select memories in mice" from CBC News, stated that scientists had "elicited memory loss by manipulating the activity of a protein called alpha-CaM kinase II,” but the way they tested this seemed really fishy to me. They tested the mice for memory loss by classically condidtioning them to anticipate/ fear an electrical shock after hearing a certain noise. Once they were conditioned to fear the noise, they were treated with the brain protein, and were left alone for one month. After the month was up, they were put in a different cage than they were originally conditioned to fear the noise in and they did not act scared when they heard the noise, but when they were put in the original cage, they showed a fear response to the noise.

These findings cannot necessarily be interpreted to mean that the mice had forgotten their fear of the noise. The more likley explanation is that classical conditioning is not generalizable. If the conditions change (eg. A different cage or a slightly different noise) the mice would not show the fear response.

Scientists should not be wasting their time on this kind of thing, in my humble opinion, they should be finding the cure for cancer, or developing some kind of miracle corn that will end world hunger.

Thinking about thinking part 1 of 3

There are many things in life that people want to forget, terrible breakups, failed dreams, the list goes on and on. Sadly, this is not how life works. As my sister pointed out to me in an email the other day,

"when you want to forget something you can't because the act of wanting to forget it just makes you think about it even more, ergo making you even more unhappy, and stressing over a problem that isn't even worth your time."

She's absolutely right, trying to forget is one of the sure fire ways to remember something. In an article I read for my psych class recently, there was an interesting research study done. It stated that if a person is given a list of words to memorize and then told to forget a few of the words, they are more likely to remember the words they were told to forget because they were thinking about trying to forget about them.

Brain Tangents

Everyone's brain wanders around from time to time. When brains go off on these tangents, it can be hard to get them back on track. Unlike when classes purposefully try to get professors off on tangents to avoid boring lectures and in an attempt to learn something truly interesting, brain tangents can be rather annoying because just like the professors, you eventually have to get back to where you were. It's easy for a professor, they just look down at their lecture notes, but when your brain wanders, stuff doesn't get done because it gets forgotten about.

In the shower is just about the best and worst place to think about those big ideas. It is the best place because no one talks to you. You are completely and totally alone with your thoughts for ten to twenty minutes and some pretty serious thinking can happen with that kind of quality time. Sadly, there is no place to write any of it down, so even if you come up with the cure for cancer in the shower chances you are not going to remember it when you get out. It's sort of like a dream in that sense because since it is only you thinking in the shower, you don't have to explain your thoughts to anyone or organize them in any way by writing them down, so they rarely make sense when you are done washing your hair none the less when you try to tell someone else about them.

On perception and spiraling out of control.

A lot of weight rests on a person's perception of themselves. If a person believes they are unattractive, they will believe that others see them as unattractive no matter how untrue this belief is. In their most extreme forms, these self beliefs lead to things like eating disorders, in which people try to 'fix' their imaginary body flaws. But in every day life, our perceptions just effect how we deal with situations.

Perceptions have a great deal to do with a person's past. A person who believes they are unattractive generally got that belief from somewhere. Maybe they got it in the first grade when the person they thought was cute said "eew you're gross," and this particular person took it to heart, or maybe it was a more recent and real situation like being dumped by a boyfriend for being a little overweight. In either case, this person's perception of themselves will effect how they del with relationships in the future.

Perceptions can also be temporary. Every interaction we have presents the opportunity for people to give us a perception of ourselves. I for example have a belief that all computers hate me, and so I only like them as long as they are working properly. Thus, the other day after a long hard day (which presented a temporary perception of hopelessness), when I was faced with a computer malfunction, I basically wanted to throw my computer out of the fourth floor window. I cried and screamed and it was generally not pretty. Who knows if on a day that had been better, I may have reacted completely differently to my stupid computer, but as it was, I was pissed and my day affected my reaction.