When is your mother’s birthday? What outfit did you wear yesterday? Did you remember to turn the stove off before you left the house? You can probably come up with the answer to these question and many others thanks to an impressive memory system in the brain. The capacity of knowledge our brain is capable of holding overtime is impressive. Yet, research has found that while we may be confident in questions regarding to memory, you may be surprised how often our memory is wrong.

Perhaps one of the most important applications of this memory failing phenomenon is how impactful it can be in the case of eye witnesses. For decades, criminal trials have placed incredible pressure on eye witnesses to accurately recount crimes. The consequences of these accounts can cost an innocent man years in prison or possibly worse, a guilty man to walk away without penalties. These memory errors can occur due to many reasons from inability to recall the memory, attentional deficits during the event, and weapon focus which refers to an attentional focus on a weapon in a situation therein taking away concentration and reliability about the full nature of the crime (McLeod, 2009). Luckily, in today’s society juries and judges also have reliable DNA evidence to supplement their verdicts.

A most recent and prominent example of the influence of eyewitness testimonies is that in the case of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, MO.  60 eye witness testimonies were considered by the 13 jurors before deciding not indict Officer Darren Wilson. Riots formed all over the country in response to what was believed to be a racially biased hearing, when so many people accounted that Michael Brown was unarmed and fleeing when shot and killed by Officer Wilson. Yet, DNA backs Officer Wilson’s account that he and Brown wrestled over possession of the fire arm, “The wound on Brown’s thumb contained “microscopic matter from the barrel” of the officer’s pistol, according to the report. Wilson’s other five shots hit Brown from the front, contradicting some witness reports that Brown had been running away from the officer when he was shot”( Upper, 2014). DNA has proven over time to be incredibly reliable, so whether or not the eye witnesses in the case were just friends of Michael Brown , experiencing weapon focus, or incorrectly recalled memories; thanks largely in part to forensic evidence, Officer Wilson was able to walk away from very serious accusations despite confliction eyewitnesses.

References

Upper, G. (2014). New Autopsy Report Changes Everything About the Michael Brown Shooting. Conservative Tribune. Retrieved from http://conservativetribune.com/new-autopsy-michael-brown/.

McLeod, S. A. (2009). Eyewitness Testimony. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html

Tickets were purchased, we had a bucket of popcorn, and were reclining in our seats when the lights dimmed and there, standing 20 feet tall, was Ben Affleck. That’s right after reading the book and all of the media hype, I got to see the box office hit Gone Girl. For those of you who have yet to immerse yourself in the twisted, sexy thriller, I highly recommend making your way to the nearest movie theatre, as soon as possible. Shortly after seeing the cinema, I received a call from a long distance friend who asked how the movie was and what is was about. I responded with excitement how the movie started out and how the mystery developed. Immediately after, I described the emotions and surprise I felt at the end of the movie. The movie itself was over 2 hours long though, why was it so hard for me to recall the middle of the movie? As humans, it’ easier for us to account for information at the beginning and end of sequences thanks to the serial position effect (Goldstein, 2011).

The ability to more easily and readily recall information at the end of the sequence is called the recency effect (Goldstein, 2011). It seems understandable that when all is said done, one would remember the end of a movie for the sheer fact that is the most exciting and memorable part. In a test of memory, the recency effect can be explained due to the ability to recall information from the short term or working memory. Because of this, the recency effect only lasts about 30 seconds since short term memory only has the capacity to hold information for 30 seconds (Goldstein, 2011). If there is a delay between exposure and when the subjects are asked to recall information, the recency effect may disappear entirely. In fact, data even suggests that information stored in the short term memory begins to dissipate as soon as recall begins (Beaman & Morton, 2000).

In contrast, you would think that items from the beginning of a sequence might be the most  difficult to remember since they would fade from short term memory first. Studies have found this contrary to the truth, in fact, information presented at the beginning of a sequence tends to have one of the highest rates of recall as seen in the attached graphic. When watching a movie as intricate as Gone Girl, I often found myself thinking about information presented at the beginning of the movie and making connections to other events in the film to try and solve the mystery. Similar to that, in a test of memory a subject rehearses and repeats the first few pieces of information. The processes is repeated for each object until the short term memory is full, over time, some of the information will be coded for, stored, and called from the long term memory, referred to as the primacy effect (Goldstein, 2011).

The serial position effect can most easily be demonstrated through memory tests most often done simply with words but similar concepts can be found with almost every form of media we take in. Be it movies, books, even lessons in class. It may seem like memories from the middle of the material vanish right into thin air. In reality, our brains just aren’t as well equipped to recall information from the middle of the sequences. Not all hope is lost, with enough rehearsal anything can be stored in long term memory. For now, anyone I recount Gone Girl too will just have to be happy with knowing how the movie ends, after all, it is the best part of the movie.

References

Goldstein, E. B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (3rd ed.). California: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Beaman, C., & Morton, J. (2000). The separate but related origins of the recency effect and the modality effect in free recall. Cognition,77, 59-65. Retrieved October 19, 2014, from www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit.

The world is vast, stretching nearly 24,902 miles (Sharp, 2012), incredibly diverse, and complicated. It’s a miracle that every day the human body is able to perceive all the information gathered from stimuli through sensory organs and convert them into thoughts and images we can use to understand the world. It’s still not completely understood yet how exactly the brain is able to do this. What has been proven is that the brain creates this reality by processing different stimuli in specific parts of the brain, a phenomena called localization of function (Goldstein, 2011), because of which, we can lose specific abilities and even distort our perception of reality by damaging or injuring specific parts of the brain.

In high school, I was fortunate enough to take part in an internship at a local rehabilitation facility where our patients often came to us having recently experienced a stroke. Patients spent weeks in the facility trying to gain movement back in their extremities and relearning how to perform the most basic tasks. A stroke is when the flow of blood is cut off completely or greatly diminished to specific regions of the brain. Often times, when blood is restricted to the left side of the brain, the person is unable to move parts on the right side of the body and possibly, according to Allina Patient Education (2011), “control the ability to pay attention, recognize things you see, hear or touch, and be aware of your own body.” Similarly, when a stroke occurs to the right side of the brain, movement is restricted on the left side of the body and the person is also likely to have complications with communication (Allina Patient Education, 2011).

Selective functions of processing language can be altered by effecting even more specific parts of the brain. House M.D. is one of my Netflix favorites, a drama focused around a renowned diagnostics team, loosely based on real life medical conditions. In season two, episode ten a man falls and hits head on a desk, briefly unconscious, he wakes only for those around him to realize he cannot put the correct words into sentences. This and other complications with processing language, reading, writing, and speech are called aphasias. We also learned about both Broca and Wernicke’s aphasias in lesson 2. Both of these aphasias would be caused by damage to incredibly specific and small smarts of the brain seen on page 33 of Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday, Wernicke’s area being a small section in the temporal lobe and Broca’s area, an even smaller section, in the frontal lobe.

Many parts of the brain must work together to interpret and organize information into useful thoughts and accurate perceptions, without every piece of the puzzle, there can be major issues. We’ve looked at just a few of the thousands of disorders that can occur when one part of the brain is cut off from the rest. The consequences can be devastating and life altering. Thankfully, many of these conditions are becoming more and more manageable, if not treatable through modern science.

References

Allina Patient Education (2011). Effects of left-sided stroke: Aphasia and language apraxia. Retrieved September 13, 2014, from http://www.allinahealth.org/ac/strokemanual.nsf/page/left_sided_stroke.

Goldstein, E. B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (3rd ed.). California: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Sharp, T. (2012). How big is earth. Retrieved September 14, 2014, from http://www.space.com/17638-how-big-is-earth.html.