Tag Archives: Memory

Chunks of Pi

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I remember it all too clearly. Eighth grade. Pi day (3/14). Every year, the teacher who teaches the 8th grade math class I was in had the students do three things. First, we all had to come in sporting some sort of shirt which had its own Pi day reference. Second, each student was assigned to do a poster on the history of pi. Lastly, all students of her class participated in a memory contest to see who could recite the most digits of pi. Was I about to go home and study, hours on end, memorizing the many digits of the endless irrational number known as pi? Heck no. So what did I do? Instead of paying attention in all my classes before math (which was all of my classes besides gym), I managed to memorize over one hundred digits of pi. I am baffled by the thought of it to this day, but how did I do it?

With the help of my hippocampus which allowed me to create a huge pile-up of short-term memories, I used the memorization technique known as chunking to achieve first place in this contest. Chunking is used almost daily in everyone’s lives. If you look at a simple telephone number such as 123-456-7890, the ten digit sequence is split up into three “chunks” in order to make the number easier to remember. If you look at the number without the dashes, 1234567890, it seems a little bit harder to remember (besides the fact that the number IS just 1234567890). Back to the memory contest; throughout the day, I created numerous chunks of pi (still talking about the number pi), each consisting of ten digits. I would study the first chunk of ten, saying them in order in my head multiple times over, then move on to the next chunk. As I continued from chunk to chunk, I would eventually start back at the beginning, but combine each chunk to create my huge string of memorized digits of pi.

By the time I stepped in the door of my math class, this technique had allowed me to memorize just over one hundred digits of pi. To my surprise, I was able to recite them perfectly, as though I had been practicing for this contest for ages. The next day though, when I tried to remember them again to impress the girls sitting at my lunch table (such a skill is so impressive I know), I only made it to about sixty. Before I knew it (meaning within a week), I had absolutely no recollection of pi. I was astonished by how quickly I lost my newfound ability, but the pi contest was over, so whatever. The usefulness of chunking remains great to this day, and I’m sure that for all of you readers, the feeling is mutual.

My First Memory

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“What is your first memory?” It’s a fairly common question.  One I know that I have been asked many times.  Most people have an already prepared answer.  I know I do; I even wrote an essay on it freshman year of high school for English class.  I remember going to Idlewild when I was four years old.  Honestly, the only vivid memory I have is playing in the ball pit.  Because of my parents, I know I spent the rest of the day on Mister Roger’s Train and in Story Book Forest, but for some reason the only memory that stuck was the ball pit.

In class, we learned that it is impossible to know which memories are real and which are just reconstructions that our brains create.  I like to believe that the ball pit is an actual memory and what I am recalling actually happened, but it is simply impossible to know.  Maybe, I am just creating a picture in my mind of a memory based on what my parents have told me.  My parents on several occasions have told me about my first trip to Idlewild.  Apparently, I loved the Good Ship Lollipop, and they had to literally drag me out of the ball pit.  It is possible that what I am recalling as my first memory is not actually a memory at all.

What seems like a simple question, “What is your first memory?” is actually an impossible one to answer.  The idea that what we remember may not actually be real is an almost creepy concept to consider.

What about memories that we recall often?  In class, we used the example of September 11.  I was fairly young on that day, only in second grade, but I can still remember that day like a short movie clip.  I can remember that it was a Tuesday.  I can almost hear my principal coming on the loud speaker to announce that there had been an attack.  I can remember that by lunch time, parents of some of my classmates started to arrive to take their children home.  I remember returning to my classroom, and my teacher telling us that we could just play games until our parents arrived.  I can still remember when my parents arrived and drove me home.  When we finally got home, I remember watching the news and seeing the plane crashes occurring over and over again.

It feels like a vivid movie reel in my head, but is it even a real memory.  It is a memory I have had to recall so many times that I wonder if I am remembering the actual memory or if my brain is just constructing a memory based on previous recollections and not the actual event.  I will never know.

Memory is difficult to study.  Knowing how easily it can be manipulated and how unreliable it is, is important especially considering how many court cases are decided by eye witness testimony.  With more study, maybe we will unlock more information about how we process, store, and recall memories, but for now, I guess I will just have to keep using the Idlewild story as my first memory.

Tip of the Tongue

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During Spring Break of my sophomore year (2012) I had my first job interview. It was for an internship with a financial firm in New York City and my dad knew one of the partners, so I was feeling very confident going into it. I had 4 interviews that day, but I most vividly remember the first one, which was with a partner named Dave. After the typical “tell me about yourself” and “walk me through your resume,” Dave asked me some brainteasers and mental math questions. I nailed all of them and was feeling great. Then he asked, “What is the name of the president on the hundred dollar bill?” I exclaimed, “that’s easy, it’s…umm…hold on a second, its on the tip of my tongue.” After struggling to remember for about a minute he told me that it was Benjamin Franklin. I knew it, but under the pressure I just couldn’t recall it, even though it felt so close. It was also a trick question, because Benjamin Franklin was never president. Had I recalled his name I most likely would not have remembered this fact. Despite my misstep, Dave and the other interviewers seemed to like me and I was offered the internship.

To answer the questions in that interview I had to use memory, which is a topic we have been studying in class. There are three types of memory systems: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. The question I was asked related to declarative memory, which is a type of long-term memory containing information that is conscious and known. More specifically, it involved a type of declarative memory called semantic memory, which contains general knowledge, such as language and information learned in formal education. In retrieving information from long-term memories, we use either recall or recognition. In recall, memories are retrieved with few or no external cues, while recognition involves looking at or hearing information and matching it to what is already in memory. The question I was asked was a recall question. When I felt like I was so close to getting the answer but couldn’t retrieve it I was experiencing the tip of the tongue phenomenon. This retrieval failure is best overcome by forgetting about what you are trying to retrieve. Even though you forget about it the brain continues to work on retrieval and later the word will simply pop into your head. I didn’t have the luxury of simply forgetting about who was on the hundred dollar bill during my interview, but I’m sure if they hadn’t told me I would have remembered soon after I left the office.

Source: Course textbook (Ciccarelli Custom Edition for PSU)

Memories and Imagination

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Memories are very tricky things. More often that not, memories are actually true. Dr. Wede explained that if most of our memories weren’t true our lives’ would be a total mess. However, it is hard to be completely certain whether a memory is true or false. Imagination can play a big role in how someone remembers something. As we talked about in class, it is also difficult to actually remember events that happened at a really young age. Imagination can play a role in the way that memories are constructed and can either enhance or hinder the credibility of a memory.

In my own experience, there is a memory that I have from when I was probably five or six years old. My family went on vacation to Disney World for a week. The resort that we were staying at had a pool that had one end that was a section designed specifically for kids with shallow water and holes that water popped up through. Then, the further you walk in the deeper the water gets. When I was this small, we had a floaty ring that I was supposed to wear around my waist. I went in without this ring and kept walking to where I couldn’t touch. My memory is very clear of me going under the water and looking up toward the sky seeing that I was underwater and freaking out. I remember a specific one of my aunts saving me.

The problem? This aunt wasn’t on vacation with us. This event is perfectly clear to me in my head, but when I ask about it, I am told that this aunt wasn’t there at all. It makes me wonder if any of this memory is true at all. It is obvious that imagination has played a role in creating or at least shaping this memory because my mind told me that my favorite aunt had saved me when she wasn’t even there. It’s amazing the way we can have memories that seem so real to us, but that might not be real at all.

Memory Construction

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In class lately, we have generally been talking about how our memory works. What I found to be most interesting was when Professor Wede mentioned how the ability to forget is an evolutionary part of thinking. The concept I would like to discuss is about how memory is a constructive process in which missing pieces of information are filled in or filtered in order to make getting information out more comprehensible. In my perspective, this essentially means that we have the ability to build upon or create new memories based off of old, possibly false ones. In contrast, we also have the ability to reflect and give attention to specific parts of old memories. Whenever I catch up with one of my good friends, Katie, I have noticed that we fill in each other’s gaps about things we have done together. We could have both been in the same situation or have been together at the same place at the same time, but I almost always notice things that she has no recollection of and vice versa when reflected upon at a later time. I feel that this is a true example of importance of perspective – more specifically, perspective can also change a memory.

Once again, memory is a constructive process. Because of this, it causes things like the misinformation effect and hindsight bias. Misinformation effect is when the incorporation of misleading information into one’s memory of an event. From the examples in class, a major cause of this appears to be wording. Specific wording implies different things to different people. For me, I had frustrated with what words implied what meanings with my parents, who often speak in Chinese with me. Some meaning gets lost in translation, so when I was growing up, I would unintentionally take things the wrong way because I would remember how the Chinese word was used in one situation and apply it to another, more incorrect situation. The other problem caused by constructive processes of the memory is hindsight bias: a false belief that one could or should have predicted the outcome of an event. This happens often in everyday situation like, “Oh I knew this was going to happen…” or “I was sure she was going to get it!” This past week at my tournament for Ultimate Frisbee, I was sure that there would be multiple complete catches that ended up being drops and then a turnover.

To conclude, memories are powerful in the sense that they are not essentially always true or false. At the end of Lecture 11, I actually wondered whether I would rather have the inability to create any new memories or have the ability to never forget anything (a superautobiographical memory) as mentioned in class. So, even though our working memories are not necessarily always reliable, I have concluded that this more normal option is better than the other two extremes which make it impossible to function in daily life.

Hindsight Bias

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It was close to January in high school. I was sitting in my living room waiting for the mailman to come by. I was waiting on the acceptance letter to the college. The college I desired to attend was the great school named Penn State University. I was extremely nervous because I really wanted attend this school and had no idea what the results were going to be. The mail comes in. I GOT ACCEPTED.  I happily jumped around and immediately ran to my mother and told her the amazing news. She replied, “I knew you were going to get in!” She congratulated me and explained how it was no surprise to her. Later that day, I also shared this news with my father. In the middle of my conversation, my dad blurted out and said that “to think your mom was talking to me about her doubts about you getting into Penn State earlier this week.”

What occurred with my mom in psychology is called hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is referred to the tendency to overestimate their ability to predict what will occur when they could not have actually predicted what occurred. In hindsight bias, many people would say, “I knew it!” making it seem like they made a correct guess in what occurred. This is when people believe that they knew that they predicted what had happened after the event has already occurred.

This phenomenon is also referred as the knew-it-all-along effect. The phenomenon of hindsight bias is an example of constructive-processing view. Constructive-processing view is the retrieval of memories in which those memories are altered, revised, or influenced by newer information.  Through my case, it would have been impossible for my mom to know that I had got accepted or not. She was influenced by the hindsight bias effect by falsely believing that she knew the outcome of my acceptance to Penn State because she placed her knowledge of the event’s true outcome into her memories through revision of older memories to include the newer information.

 

Ciccarelli, Saundra K., and J. Noland White. Psychology. Third ed. N.p.: Pearson, n.d. Print.

 

 

Study Efficiently

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Sitting in the library, it is not rare to see all kinds of distractions around the students who are studying. As the high technology has developed rapidly these days, people can obtain as many information as they want by simply touching the glass screen, and there is no limit for the location either, such that two of the biggest distractions become internet and phone.

In the library, spotting a student with earphones on is a really common thing and same to the students who are checking out their phone. Personally, I am a fan of studying while listening to music, which leads to my dependency on the phone. After we cover the influence of music on people in the class, I realize that how strongly it could influence my efficiency of studying. Since the sensory memory would automatically encode the lyrics into meaning and interpret it in our minds, it will constantly interrupt our encoding of the materials that we are supposed to learn results the lower efficiently studying process. And while encoding the lyrics, it also could interrupt the understanding of the academic materials. Since generally the best way of learning is to deeply understand, think about the materials, and interpret the materials into your own way of understanding. But constantly of encoding the meaning of the lyrics will be a strong interferes of the understanding of the academic materials. In conclusion, even without internet, phone can be a big distraction.

Internet is one of the greatest invention in the world, but every coin has two side, people begin to found out the crazy influence that internet has on people. Students nowadays just can not help checking the phone out no matter what they are doing even studying. For example, I just used fifteen minutes searching on internet about the summer internship which is totally not as in a hurry as the blog assignment is. And if checking the phone once an hour, it is totally fine, but if it is too frequently, it is definitely going to hold the progress back. Because the short term memory only lasts for 12 to 30 seconds, if you want to transfer the memory into long term memory, you need to either using a better way of studying such as memorize semantically, or rehearsal in a proper amount of time. Using phone frequently results of getting interrupted every, for instance, five minutes, which means a few minutes after encoding the sensory memory into short term memory, the distraction will come in and messed up the right track.

In general, parents always do not like to see children studying with television, or internet near them, when I was young, I could not tell why, but after the principles and theories I learned in the class, I finally got it and know the proper conditions to study efficiently which is that turning off everything related to world outside, and keep yourself into a peaceful place.

Implanting Memories

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a memory of being very young, about 1 to 2 years old max, and being carried around a family party. I’m not sure who was carrying me, but they were holding me so that my back was to them and I could face forward. I can vividly picture family members conversing and being carried past my fireplace and towards our decorated living room, filled with people. However, this isn’t a true memory, it is something that has been implanted in me as one, but it never actually happened… or at least not as I think it did. One of the reasons I know that this is an implanted memory, is because the part of the living room I was moving toward didn’t exist when I was that young. My family didn’t add the addition on until I was about 5 or 6 and it wasn’t ‘decorated’ until i was at least 7. There is no possible way for me to be carried past our fireplace into our living room when i was 2.

Growing up I’ve always been told by my parents how ‘nosy’ I was as a child, and still am to this day. They explained that if anything was going on, they had to carry me facing forward so that I could see. I hated to face over their shoulder and be left out of anything or not know what was going on. Each time my parents tell me about these tendencies, has caused me to build my own false memory piecing together each little thing that they have said. This is an example of a false memory being implanted. For years I believed that it was a real memory, but now that I know that we can create false memories off of things that people have told us, I realize that it is definitely something I made up in my own mind.

Remembah? *Drake Voice*

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Memory is defined, by the words of Mr. Wede, to be the persistence of learning through different mechanisms. Those mechanisms are encoding, storage and retrieval. Encoding is the process of interpreting an event and getting into your memory. This is the first step in a three step memory process. Second comes storage. This is vital because this stowing away the information. Memory is stored using sensory memory, which has a limit of only a few seconds, short term memory, with a limit of about 30 seconds and long term memory which is somewhat permanent. Each of these play a factor in keeping a tab of everything that we see and do during the course of 24 hours. Lastly, there is retrieval. This is probably one of the most important steps in the process because it involves accessing the memories that you have locked away. Think about it, what is the point of being able to hold something if you can’t use it for your benefit later?

Memory is an extremely powerful tool. It is the basis for our thinking, decision making, the way we interpret things, etc. When you think about it, memory plays a role in almost every aspect of your life. Even when doing something as mindless as playing video games or watching television, we are storing bits and pieces to our long term memory and almost instantaneously processing all that we see and relating it to past events or images that are similar(retrieval cues). The thing is that some people have better memory than others. I am in a constant battle with memory when it comes to my involvement with music. I am a singer and so I perform at many different venues around Penn State and around New Jersey, when I head home for breaks. Different performances mean different songs and different songs mean different lyrics and as you can predict, each set of lyrics for every song has to be memorized by the time of each performance. As you can imagine, that is not the simplest task in the world but because I love what I do and as time goes on, it becomes easier and easier.

If I didn’t have a strong long term memory, I wouldn’t be able to have a music “career” because I would forget everything that I studied so hard to remember. It would last as long as sensory memory does and fall out of my head right after. Retrieval plays a large role because I need to be able to quickly access information while I am performing. If this process had a time lapse or if I had a problem with my ability to retrieve memories, again, I wouldn’t really make it too far in the music industry but thank God I do not have to deal with that. Our memories are from our experiences and our experiences shape us. So I am grateful for memory, because I wouldn’t be Paul without them.

Mood-Dependent Memory

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Last year, my AP Biology exam was scheduled for 8:00 AM on a Monday morning. Around this time, I was incredibly sick, I was having problems with a close friend, and I had just broken up with a boyfriend. I woke up late on the morning of my exam. Luckily, I was able to get into the classroom before 8:00 AM. By the time I got to the school, I looked and felt completely terrible. I was in the worst mood. I ended up basically failing the exam. I do not think that it was because of my lack of knowledge of the material. I had an A in the class. I was very confident that I knew the subject. My poor test score was only because of the given circumstances around that time that put me in a bad mood. The majority of the time that I was studying for the exam, I was in a great mood. I was doing great in my classes, my relationships were intact, and I was healthy. This is an example of mood-dependent memory.

Mood-dependent memory was researched by Eric Eich and Janet Metcalfe. They found that people perform better on assessments when their moods are similar when they study AND when they take the test. When we encode information, we associate it with the current emotional state we are in. If our mood changes when it is time to recall the information, it is harder to remember. We can’t bring those memories back as efficiently because we don’t feel the same way anymore. On the other hand, if our mood stays consistent, it is easier to recall information because we are still in the same state of mind. This is why I was unable to perform well on my AP Biology exam; I was in a positive mood when I was studying and a negative mood when I actually took the exam.