Forgotten Memories Are Still in Your Brain
- From: childadvocate <smartnews@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:29:03 -0700 (PDT)
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/forgottenmemories/
http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Sociology-of-Memory--Papers-from-the-Spectrum1-4438-0199-2.htm
Forgotten Memories Are Still in Your Brain By Brandon Keim September
9, 2009 ...Though the memory is hidden from your conscious mind, it
might not be gone. In a study of college students, brain imaging
detected patterns of activation that corresponded to memories the
students thought they'd lost. "Even though your brain still holds this
information, you might not always have access to it," said
neurobiologist Jeffrey Johnson of the University of California,
Irvine. His remarks appeared in the study he co-authored, published
Wednesday in Neuron. That recalling a memory triggers the neurological
patterns encoded when the memory was formed is a tenet of cognitive
science. Less understood, however, is what becomes of those patterns
at moments of incomplete recall...."It wasn't quite clear what happens
to them," said Johnson of lost details. "But even when people claim
that there are no details attached to their memories, we could still
pick some of those details out."....Johnson's team put eleven female
and five male college students inside an fMRI machine, which measures
real-time patterns of blood flow in the brain. Each student was shown
a list of words, then asked to say each word backwards, think of how
it could be used, and imagine how an artist would draw it. Twenty
minutes later, the researchers showed them the list again, and asked
the students to remember what they could of each word. Recollection
triggered the original learning patterns, a process known technically
as reinstatement; the stronger the memory, the stronger the signal.
"What I think is cool about the study is that the degree of cortical
reinstatement is related to the strength of our subjective experience
of memory," said Anthony Wagner, a Stanford University memory
researcher who wasn't involved in the experiment. But at the weak end
of the gradient, where the students' conscious recall had faded to
zero, the signal was still there. It's possible that the students lied
about what they remembered. But if not, then memory may truly persist.
The question then is how long memories could last - weeks, months,
even years. "We can only speculate that this is the case," said
Johnson, who plans to run brain-imaging studies of memory degradation
over days and weeks. As for whether those memories could be
intentionally guided to the surface, Johnson says that "at this stage,
we're just happy to be able to find evidence of reinstatement at a
weak level. That would be something down the line."
Citation: "Recollection, Familiarity, and Cortical Reinstatement: A
Multivoxel Pattern Analysis." By Jeffrey D. Johnson, Susan G.R.
McDuff, Michael D. Rugg, and Kenneth A. Norman. Neuron, Vol. 63 Issue
5, September 8, 2009.
Recollection, Familiarity, and Cortical Reinstatement: A Multivoxel
Pattern Analysis
Jeffrey D. Johnson1, 4, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-
mail The Corresponding Author, Susan G.R. McDuff2, 4, Michael D. Rugg1
and Kenneth A. Norman2, 3
1Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and Department of
Neurobiology and Behavior, University of California, Irvine, Irvine,
CA 92697, USA
2Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544,
USA
3Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
08544, USA
Published: September 9, 2009.
Summary
Episodic memory retrieval is thought to involve reinstatement of the
neurocognitive processes engaged when an episode was encoded. Prior
fMRI studies and computational models have suggested that
reinstatement is limited to instances in which specific episodic
details are recollected. We used multivoxel pattern-classification
analyses of fMRI data to investigate how reinstatement is associated
with different memory judgments, particularly those accompanied by
recollection versus a feeling of familiarity (when recollection is
absent). Classifiers were trained to distinguish between brain
activity patterns associated with different encoding tasks and were
subsequently applied to recognition-related fMRI data to determine the
degree to which patterns were reinstated. Reinstatement was evident
during both recollection- and familiarity-based judgments, providing
clear evidence that reinstatement is not sufficient for eliciting a
recollective experience. The findings are interpreted as support for a
continuous, recollection-related neural signal that has been central
to recent debate over the nature of recognition memory processes.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WSS-4X6GR82-H&_user=10&_coverDate=09%2F10%2F2009&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=ec41eaf57212c754a5f6a93f4d889eba
Call for Papers: "Sociology of Memory: New and Old Conceptualizations
of Memory, Personal or Commodity, Public or Private?" Papers
pertaining to: collective memory; personal memory; narrative; new and
old sociological theories and conceptualizations of memory;
sociological, psychological, historical or legal conceptualizations
pertaining to personal, trauma, repressed, body memory; socio-
political issues pertaining to "commodity memory" (such as electronic
dataveillance, video surveillance; seed, sperm, egg or DNA banking);
drug technology to improve or repress memory; and closely related
topics are invited to present their research at the 2010 Pacific
Sociological Association's 81st Annual meeting, to be held at the
Marriott Oakland City Center in downtown Oakland, California on April
8 - 11 (Thursday - Saturday), 2010. Past papers from this session are
featured in the book, Sociology of Memory: Papers from the Spectrum
(2009), forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. For more
information see: http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Sociology-of-Memory--Papers-from-the-Spectrum1-4438-0199-2.htm
Please send initial inquirers, abstracts and contact information to:
Noel Packard at packardn@xxxxxxxxxxx Visit the Pacific Sociological
Association website at www.pacificsoc.org for conference information
and paper submission procedures. Follow links to Session Category
Theory, Sociological Imagination, Knowledge, Science and Technology
and within that category find the Sociology of Memory link. Deadline:
November 15, 2009.
.
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