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.