Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Storage of memory
John McCrone writing in New Scientist, 3 May 2003, reported on researches that have been done on memory. He wrote: "Psychologists have long known that our memories are easily embellished. We add imaginary details through wishful thinking, or to make a more logical story. More controversially, memory may be falsified through suggestion and through manipulative questioning, bringing some eyewitness testimony and 'recovered' memories into doubt. And we all forget things too. But despite these flaws it was always presumed that the experiences themselves - the memory traces stamped into the fabric of our brain - were permanent. Look in the right place and we could always dig back to what really happened. But that's simply not so, according to some surprising new research. A memory is anything but static. Resurrecting a memory trace appears to render it completely fluid, as pliable and unstable as the moment it was first formed, and in need of fixing once again into the brain's circuitry. Any meddling with this fixing process could alter the trace - or even erase it
completely. Simply retelling a tale may be enough to change that memory for good. Long-term memory is effectively a myth." McCrone went on to describe experiments done on rats by Karim Nader and Joseph Le Doux. They trained the animals to fear a box they were in by giving them mild electric shocks to the feet. After that the rats would become panicky if put back in the box, even if there was no electric shock - they remembered the unpleasant experience of the shock. The next thing they did was to give the rats an injection of a drug to stop protein synthesis, because the registering of memories is done by laying down of proteins in the nerve cells. Then when the rats were put near the box they again became panicky. But rats that had also been reminded of the experience by being shown the box immediately before the injection seemed to lose that memory, they were no longer frightened. They just wandered nonchalantly around the box. Now we know that people are not rats, but the nervous systems at the level of frightening memories are very similar between the two species. It is well known that the memory of a recent event, in people as well as lower animals, is still quite 'fluid' before it is 'fixed' in the memory stores. For instance, if the brain experiences concussion, such as in an accident or a fall, the recent memories (but not the older memories) will disappear because they have not yet been 'fixed' in the memory stores. Nader and Le Doux concluded that, in the same way, when a memory is recalled it becomes 'fluid' again and is no longer fixed in the memory stores. In this case, the lack of ability to synthesize the proteins necessary to fix it in the memory stores led to its complete extinction. However, the implications are much wider than this. Maybe memories, when they are recalled and are 'fluid' again, can be altered in other ways. Maybe we can even turn nasty disturbing memories into 'warm fuzzy' ones. Experiments on humans support this idea.
other?" The people to whom the emotive words 'smashed into' were used, even though they had all seen the same film, were much more likely to remember the cars going much faster and the accident being more destructive. Then a week later they were all asked, "Did you see any broken glass?" The people who had been asked the 'smashed' question were much more likely to remember seeing broken glass, although there was none in the movie. Loftus uses this research to emphasize that eyewitness testimony in legal cases may be unreliable, and even vulnerable to manipulation by examining attorneys, by the words they use. We see it also as an example of just how pliable memories are, once they have again come out of the memory stores.
meditation practices give the memories a 'screen' onto which they are 'projected' so that we can become aware of them. It seems that what we are doing in the meditation then is to disempower the old samskaras by resurrecting the repressed memories when we are in the deeply relaxed state of the drashta - the witness or sakshi position. The resurrection of the memory then makes it 'pliable' and able to be changed by associating it with the disinterested relaxation rather than the old destructive emotion. It can then be re-remembered, but this time via the relaxed neutral route rather than the stressful adrenalin, nor-adrenalin, amygdala route. Then it ceases to have power over us forever.