Hey everyone doing some work at uni about memories and I was wondering if you could quickly fill in this for me and get it sent back via email or comment or message or msn ect,ectJ would be awesome!
Just 5 simple questions here we go...
1.What is your earliest memory?
2.What is your favourite memory?
3.What is your worst memory?
4.What were you thinking about before you started doing this?
5.Do you have any photographs/video of your favourite or worst memories? (if so could you please email me then at stimu1us@hotmail.com if they are appropriate)
This is one of my photos taken of my grandma when she was telling stories, she stopped to puff on her fag, memories of the story still in her face, searching her mind for the next part of the tale. smoking fucking kills by *stimu1us
taken from http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/past_exhibitions/moving_pictures/highlights_13a.html
PIERRE HUYGHE
Pierre Huyghe questions the very definitions of time, memory, and engagement in his practice. Often using film as his source material, Huyghe dislocates it from the cinematic space of the theater and refashions it in his installations to extend the narrative space of the film through formal and conceptual strategies. His two-channel video projection The Third Memory takes as its point of departure a bank robbery committed by John Woytowicz in Brooklyn in 1972. The robbery became the subject of Sidney Lumet's film Dog Day Afternoon (1975), starring Al Pacino as the misguided robber who dominated television news during the crime. For his project, Huyghe tracked down Woytowicz and asked him to retell his story. The compelling result is a "third memory," neither a pure recollection of the original event (if such "purity" is ever possible) nor the "second memory," as depicted in the film. As Woytowicz recounts a story which is no longer his alone, notions of reality and fiction, the imagined and the documented, become inextricably intertwined.
In Pierre Huyghe's One Million Kingdoms (2001), a voice maps out unexplored lunar terrain. The voice belongs to a Japanese Manga character named AnnLee, for which Huyghe, along with artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno, purchased the copyright in 1999. Featured in previous works by the three artists, here this brooding young girl speaks in a voice that is an electronically altered version of the astronaut Neil Armstrong's communiqués from the first moon landing; the text she recites conflates Armstrong's historic utterances with excerpts from Jules Verne's 1895 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. Armstrong's words prompt AnnLee as she moves from place to place on a constantly fluctuating landscape, in which mountains, craters, ridges, and outcroppings rise and fall according to the sound waves of his (her) voice.
http://worldart.sjsu.edu/Obj19041$12435
For the sake of a memory by ~shimoda7 32x24 cm white drawing paper HB, 2B (mechanical) and 3B (regular) photo ref. 15 hours
I have less than a week to get my ideas into a presentable form to which I can explain how my work will progress after the Christmas Period. Having yet to still pin down a certain idea I am stuggling to think of more ideas.
From being behind the rest of the class I feel even more pressure to sort this work out. Finding out all my previous ideas were almost usless in terms of a core concept or a personal response, in the 3 weeks I have had I feel I have produced some substancial research on which to back up and form ideas, but time is wearing thin and I feel rushed to get some ideas together. At this point I feel I could spoil the rest of my work by rushing into an idea which hasn't been fully thought out (due to lack of time).
I feel like I should just work on one idea, gather illustrations, video and audio which I can then present, even if this would not be my final idea it would get the presentation out of the way so over the christmas period I can finish my dissertation and come back in January with more time to work on my ideas.
These next few days are crutial to my wellbeing on the course so I have planned my days agressivly on TaDa.com. My lack of attendance to the course is not helpping either, I am unsure of what is going on in the university, unsure of the actual presentation date, I assume it would be on the wednesday and even spread over onto the thursday.
I will need 2x A2 storyboards designing for the presentation along with prototypes for my main idea. This will have to be printed on Monday or at the very latest Tuesday morning! I also need to email Jen about seeing her or someone on monday to go over the final ideas for the presentation. I am not very confident speaking to a group of people that size even if it is my class, the stressful timeframe will not help that day either.
So now I have arrange a photo session to get some images together to use with/as illustations for the storyboards. I have started to create an idenity for a website/storyboards which has colourschemes and typefaces, although these need more work. Inspiration is a main problem, and I will spend part of today looking for artists which use memory in there work. I need to create a logo for the project but STILL have not recived my logo book in the mail! The blog is now backed up in a word document but it is in draft form, although now is not the time to be worrying about how my sketchbook look, I just need to get this presentation sorted out.
image taken from http://www.mikejonze.com/images/TV/hellotomorrow2.jpg
Before I watched this I had heard many a good word about this film.I don’t actually know why I hadn’t seen it before.The film is about a couple whose relationship has gone wrong and the woman goes to see a doctor about getting all her memories removed from the relationship.The next day her boyfriend realizes that she doesn’t know who she is and decided to get his memories wiped.
The film is then shot from 2 perspectives; one is the real world outside his mind.The other is the memories from inside the man’s mind.He is in a dream state induced by drugs, from here his memories which have been mapped the day before are cleared.
From the other films I have seen which look at memory I found to be the most visually exploration.The style and camera work were amazing, just the thing I like.There is one scene where the main character is in a street chasing after his girlfriend after an argument.He parks his car at one side of the street and walks chasing her.This was perceived as the memory, he then steps out of the memory and walks to the other side of the street where his car is then in front of him.Walking back on himself he walks to where he previously was and his car is where he left it.He then runs to catch up with his memory and the car seems to be at the end of the road.After arguing which was the memory, he walks back on himself again to find the car where he left it in the original place.The whole thing is shot with amazing fluidity and there aren’t any points where you feel that time was stop, the whole shoot was well thought out and the end result was amazing and confusing.
Other visuals from this film were the forgetting of faces which blurred.I have already myself used the same idea so I wouldn’t think the idea was very original but the way in which it was shot was.It was actually quite scary when the doctor’s face was missing because the memories have been previously wiped.When memories were being wiped the scene transformed into a spotlight area and you could only see from within the spotlight.When everything was dark and you just saw a blurred face it was quite disturbing.I think this portrayed the emotions on the man very well.
Other visuals were any data not remembered or needed was not shown in the dream state.There is another scene in the library and all the books spines and bookcase sections have been masked out.The whole thing isn’t just stationary; it has a fluid feel to it.Some spines are shown and then suddenly flash with a white blocked area of the spine.I think this was to show the memory being wiped but in my eyes a memory would not have remembered little if any of the books when his concentration was directed towards his girlfriend.
image taken from http://www.chucksconnection.com/eternalsunshine/eternal01.jpg
The ending of the removal of his memories is quite surreal.He is saying goodbye to his girlfriend as the memory of the relationship is starting.To say goodbye at the start of something is quite strange.As he is doing this the house is falling apart around him.This memory was strongest in his mind and the falling down of the house was slow.I think the director wanted to show that the strongest memories are the hardest to forget.The gradual destruction of the house showed this and it was different from the other style used to show the removal of memories.
I thought this was a very interesting and well shot movie.Some of the casting let the film down but Jimm Carry’s performance was amazing.Some of the film was cluttered with humour which I thought never really worked too well.The scene where they were getting drunk and stoned while his memories were being wiped was a bit over the top, although I did see the reason for using something which distracted the observer from the waking of the dream state.
I found a relationship to another film called ’50 First Dates’ where there is a dream state from which memories are created, although the science behind them are a little different.In my research I found out that dreaming helps with the organizing of the long term memory.In Eternal Sunshine the removal of memories was seen in a dream state where as in 50 First Dates she was unable to store her day’s information while sleeping.They both showed this removal of memories while in sleep states.
image taken from http://pigmotel.com/suite313/files/2006/12/eternal-sunshine-pigmotel.jpg
This film was a comedy which was based around a form of amnesia called anterograde.The film was funny as with all Sandler films but I was trying hard to keep serious and look at the ways memory problems were shown.Unlike Eternal Sunshine there was no visual evidence of how her memory was being affected, instead it was all down to acting to show the removal of a memory.
The film used a video camera to show the main character every morning about her situation.This was the method used to document the past.Almost as if her memories were on a video tape although they were not her own memories.Constructed by her boyfriend and family the video tape was only a reminder to her of how her life was being lived, there were none of her own emotions accept what was being taped.When she kisses her boyfriend on the video tape, every day she had to construct new feelings towards him for a constructed scene.
There were references to the memory condition, but the film called it ‘goldfield’s syndrome’ which I have found out is not a condition at all.This must just have been to keep the movie from getting to serious; after all it is a comedy.
A few people I have spoken to about the movie told me they found her quite annoying forgetting all these amazing memories that she had previously have.This is something I could use in my work.Repetition is a large part of the condition she had.Every day she was living the day she lost her memory, everything repeated just as it was one year ago.This could be something I chose to look at, I immediately think of Warhol’s lino prints when I think of repetition in art.Also in one of my ideas before I started to concentrate on memory I looked at an artist’s piece which used repletion of the eye.In a documentary called ‘Takashi Murakami - Toying with Art’ it explains that Takashi is the next stage of pop art and it directly references his work back to Warhol’s and another artist called Jeff Koons.
image taken from http://www.netweed.com/prohiphop/graf/superflat.jpg
Another thing I touch upon when writing my review for Eternal Dream was the dreaming in the film.When she sleeps her ability to organize her long term memory doesn’t work due to her disorder.She is a painter and she paints all these images of her boyfriend, she says they are from her dreams.This means that she doesn’t have a problem with encoding her memories more that she cannot retrieve them.There has been proof that dreaming helps memory which is something I would like to look into for my ideas.I think there is something about dreaming which is similar to a memory.
Memories are not accurate and each person will have a different memory of the same event due to individual senses of the body recording each owns environment.Like dream’s memories can warp and become something they once were not.They are both a non-reality, you can dream that a shirt is red when it is in fact blue, also you might not remember the colour of a shirt and you just add your own colour which could be yellow when in fact it was blue.I think this is also something I would need to do a little more research on but there is something which appeals to me to use in my work.
image taken from http://static.flickr.com/101/299025436_02bdbafe84_o.jpg
This film explores identity the way that ‘you are, who you are’.It’s more about trying hiding from yourself (or what you are going to do).It’s a well thought out film with strong theories about how this system they created works.It’s’ called ‘PreCrime’ and it allows people to see into the future before a murder is committed.People are then punished before the crime is committed.As with all systems with humans involved there are flaws.The system can get confused if murders occur which looks exactly the same as other.
image taken from http://www.othervoices.org/2.3/msharpe/shot.jpg
The main character has to prove he is innocent to a crime he currently had not committed.There’s a scene in the movie where he had to get his eyes replaced, as in the future identity is from the iris.This muscle is individual to each person just like a fingerprint.Like in Gattiaca identity is from the body part which is individual to each person.In both movies the main character has to hide his real identity to allow them to reach their goals.
I thought that a lot of the movie wasn’t too helpful with my ideas.It dealt with identity briefly and the rest was about how he has to prove himself innocent.
image taken from http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/images/gattaca17.jpg
The film is strongly about identity but it uses genetics to show this.When I think of identity I think about how a person looks physically or how they sound.These can all be copied by technology, Gattaca uses individual genetics to ensure that an identity is kept.The film is about a man who was born with poor genetics and to achieve his dream he must be someone who he is not.He pays to become someone else.With the help of a man who has perfect genes he is able to become this person.The person who has the perfect genetics was in an accident and unable to be his live his life at full potential, this is why he decides to help out the main character.
image taken from http://www.technovelgy.com/graphics/content06/gattaca2.jpg
The film uses technology to mask the man’s true identity, plastic fingerprints with blood underneath is used for when the ID scanners are pricked.Hair, blood urine and skin are all used to help create this fraud.A murder then accurse in the film and it almost becomes a detective film, he is then under suspicion throughout the rest of the film.It has a similar theme to Minority Report although he is not innocent like in the other film but both are on the run.
Taken from wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_memory
Photographic memory, or total recall is the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects in memory with extreme accuracy and in seemingly abundant volume. The word eidetic means extraordinarily detailed or vivid. Eidetic memory can have a very different meaning for memory experts who use the picture elicitation method to detect it. Eidetic memory as observed in children is typified by the ability of an individual to study an image for approximately 30 seconds, and maintain a nearly perfect photographic memory of that image for a short time once it has been removed--indeed such eidetikers claim to "see" the image on the blank canvas as vividly and in as perfect detail as if it were still there.
While many people demonstrate extraordinary memory abilities, it is unlikely that true eidetic memory, if it exists at all, is found in adults. While many famous artists and composers (Claude, Monet and Mozart) are commonly thought to have had eidetic memory, it is possible that their memories simply became highly trained in their respective fields of art, as they each devoted large portions of their waking hours towards the improvement of their abilities. Such a focus on their individual arts most likely improved the relevant parts of their memory, which may account for their surprising abilities.
Guinness World Records lists people with extraordinary memories. For example, on July 2, 2005, Akira Haraguchi managed to recite pi's first 83,431 decimal places from memory and more recently to 100,000 decimal places in 16 hours (October 4, 2006). The 2004 World Memory Champion Ben Pridmore memorized the order of cards in a randomly shuffled 52-card deck in 31.03 seconds.
Loci is a methord of memory learning in which you remember a place to remember an piece of information. Here is a walkthrough quick guide to the methord of loci and it is explained in nice detail from a segmet of a c4 TV program. The information is pulled from here http://www.ba.infn.it/~zito/loci.html.
To use the method of loci bring to mind a familiar building, such as your house. Take a moment to conduct a mental walk through the rooms in your house. Pay particular attention to the details , noticing any imperfections, like scratches: anything that makes your mental images more vivid. Make sure you can move easily from one room to another. Along your route create a list of "loci" :i.e. well defined parts of the room that you can use later to memorize things.A locus can be a door, a bed, an oven, etc. Be sure that you can easily go from locus to locus as you visit the house.
Now, when you are faced with a list of words or ideas to be memorized, you must form visual images for each of the words and place them, in order, on the loci in your route. To recall the words or ideas now you take a mental walk throughout your house, asking yourself , "What is on the living-room door? What's on the sleeping room bed. What's in the oven?" And so on. Associating the words or ideas to remember with the loci, you should create surprising images. More striking is the created image, more easily you will remember the thing.
To help better show what is meant by photographic memory and / or amazing feats of remembering large amounts of data accuratly, here are some videos from youtube. Derren Brown Photographic Memory
Derron Brown -- "Trick of the Mind" Card/Memory
Derren Brown - Winning at Blackjack memory tricks black jack
Derren Brown applies the psychology of memory
Stephen Wiltshire draws Rome from memory
Stephen Wiltshire draws Tokyo from memory
http://www.slate.com/id/2140685/ Here I found an artical which is written in a way as to suggest that the human mind is limitless but that there is no such thing as photographic memory, mearly strongminded dedication to something in life in which you build an amazing memory, Stephen Wiltshire is referanced in the artical but is seen as not having true photographic memory.
Stephen Wiltshire, has been called the "human camera" for his ability to create sketches of a scene after looking at it for just a few seconds. But even he doesn't have a truly photographic memory. His mind doesn't work like a Xerox. He takes liberties.
I also found this quite striking so I followed the link to learn more about his person.
Earlier this year, a group of memory researchers at the University of California-Irvine published an astonishing article about a woman called AJ who can apparently remember every day of her life since childhood.
Taken from http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1738881&page=1
Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.
McGaugh has spent decades studying how such things as stress hormones and emotions affect memory, and at first he thought AJ's memories were of such emotional power that she couldn't forget them.
That level of recall suggests another hypothesis. Some people are able to recall past events by categorizing them. Certain events, or facts, are associated with others, and filed away together so that they may be easier to access. That's a trick that is often used by entertainers who use feats of memory to wow their audience.
It's possible that AJ's brain has some "disconnections" that help her recall past events from her memory bank without interference from the parts of her brain that act as general processors. But the problem is that even if they find some interesting wiring through brain scans, the researchers will be limited in their conclusions by the fact that AJ seems to be unique.
The scientists working with AJ have given the phnomonen a name called 'hyperthymestic syndrome'. It seams that AJ is very organised person possiably with OCD (obsesive-compulsive dissorder) which enables her to remember information with amazing accuracy. Information similar to the artical I just read can be found here http://nootropics.com/hyperthymestic/index.html but scanning through the text is seams relativly the same.
* In anterograde amnesia, new events contained in the immediate memory are not transferred to the permanent as long-term memory. The sufferer will not be able to remember anything that occurs after the onset of this type of amnesia for more than a brief period following the event.
* Retrograde amnesia is the inability to recall some memory or memories of the past, beyond ordinary forgetfulness.
The terms are used to categorize patterns of symptoms, rather than to indicate a particular cause or etiology. Both categories of amnesia can occur together in the same patient, and commonly result from drug effects or damage to the brain regions most closely associated with episodic/declarative memory: the medial temporal lobes and especially the hippocampus.
An example of mixed retrograde and anterograde amnesia may be a motorcyclist unable to recall driving his motorbike prior to his head injury (retrograde amnesia), nor can he recall the hospital ward where he is told he had conversations with family over the next two days (anterograde amnesia).
* Traumatic amnesia is generally due to a head injury (fall, knock on the head). Traumatic amnesia is often transient, but may be permanent of either anterograde, retrograde, or mixed type. The extent of the period covered by the amnesia is related to the degree of injury and may give an indication of the prognosis for recovery of other functions. Mild trauma, such as a car accident that could result in no more than mild whiplash, might cause the occupant of a car to have no memory of the moments just before the accident due to a brief interruption in the short/long-term memory transfer mechanism.
* Dissociative Amnesia results from a psychological cause as opposed to direct damage to the brain caused by head injury, physical trauma or disease, which is known as organic amnesia. Dissociative Amnesia can include:
* Referring to inability to recall information, usually about stressful or traumatic events in persons' lives, such as a violent attack or rape. The memory is stored in long term memory, but access to it is impaired because of psychological defense mechanisms. Persons retain the capacity to learn new information and there may be some later partial or complete recovery of memory. This contrasts with e.g. anterograde amnesia caused by amnestics such as benzodiazepines or alcohol, where an experience was prevented from being transferred from temporary to permanent memory storage: it will never be recovered, because it was never stored in the first place. Formerly known as "Psychogenic Amnesia"
* Dissociative Fugue (formerly Psychogenic Fugue) is also known as fugue state. It is caused by psychological trauma and is usually temporary, unresolved and therefore may return. The Merck Manual defines it as "one or more episodes of amnesia in which the inability to recall some or all of one's past and either the loss of one's identity or the formation of a new identity occur with sudden, unexpected, purposeful travel away from home" [2]. While popular in fiction, it is extremely rare.
* Posthypnotic amnesia is where events during hypnosis are forgotten, or where past memories are unable to be recalled.
* Lacunar amnesia is the loss of memory about one specific event.
* Childhood amnesia (also known as infantile amnesia) is the common inability to remember events from one's own childhood. Whilst Sigmund Freud attributed this to sexual repression, others have theorised that this may be due to language development or immature parts of the brain. This is often exploited by the use of false memories in child abuse cases.
* Transient Global Amnesia is a well described medical and clinical phenomenon. This form of amnesia is distinct in that abnormalities in the hippocampi can sometimes be visualized using a special form of MRI of the brain known as diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). Symptoms typically last for less than a day and there is often no clear precipitating factor nor any other neurological deficits. The cause of this syndrome is not clear, hypotheses include transient reduced blood flow, possible seizure or an atypical type of migraine. Patients are typically amnestic of events more than a few minutes in the past, though immediate recall is usually preserved.
* Source amnesia is a memory disorder in which someone can recall certain information, but they do not know where or how they obtained the information.
* Memory distrust syndrome is a term invented by the psychologist Gisli Gudjonsson to describe a situation where someone is unable to trust their own memory.
* Excessive short-term alcohol consumption can cause a blackout phenomenon, with the amnesia being of the anterograde type.
* Long-term alcoholism or malnutrition can cause a type of memory loss known as Korsakoff's syndrome. This is caused by brain damage due to a Vitamin B1 deficiency and will be progressive if alcohol intake and nutrition pattern are not modified. Other neurological problems are likely to be present in combination with this type of Amnesia. Korsakoff's syndrome is also known to be connected with confabulation.
As you can see there are many types of memory problems, they are mainly due to either problems with encoding into LTM (long term memory) or the retreaval from LTM into the STM (short term memory) for useage. There are afew that I would like to look into further because I feel they have the most potential to produce ideas for a final piece of work. These are
Anterograde Amnesia Retrograde Amnesia Memory Distrust Syndrome The "Blackout Phenomenon" (previously looked at as my first 2nd year project)
First I will look at Anterograde.
From the Wiki page I was able to find a paragraph about the symptoms from this type of amnisia.
In the case that the amnesia is drug-induced, it may be short-lived and patients can recover from it. In the other case, which has been studied extensively since the early 1970s, patients often have damage that is permanent, although some recovery is possible, depending on the nature of the pathophysiology. Usually, there remains some capacity for learning although it may be very elementary. In cases of pure anterograde amnesia, patients have recollections of events prior to the injury but cannot recall day-to-day information or new facts that were presented to them after the injury occurred.
In most cases of anterograde amnesia, patients lose declarative memory, or the recollection of facts, but they retain non-declarative memory, often called procedural memory. For instance, they are able to remember and in some cases learn how to do things such as talking on the phone or riding a bicycle, but they may not remember what they had eaten earlier that day for lunch. In addition, patients have a diminished ability to remember the temporal context in which objects were presented. Certain authors claim that the deficit in temporal context memory is more significant than the deficit in semantic learning ability.
Taken from http://medguides.medicines.org.uk/document.aspx?name=Anterograde%20amnesia
Anterograde amnesia: This is a specific memory difficulty. Patients have good memory of events that happened before the start of their illness, but have difficulty remembering events that have happened since the illness.
I found a case of the type of illness on this site http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=861 It explains how someone live with the illness, their daily experiences and how the illness effects him. Here are little paragraphs I found intresting when reading. In contrast, anterograde amnesia does not deprive the sufferer of their identity, their past, or their skills; it merely prevents new memories from forming. As a consequence one's final memories are frozen in perpetuity, often accompanied by a constant sensation that one has just awoken from an "unconscious" state which filled the intervening time.
Again we see referances to sleep and this idea of ones identity, I like this idea of freezing. I think this works well with my possiable use of photographywhen working on my ideas. The text then goes on to explain that from a young age "henry" had seizures every few minuates which left him unconsous. Doctors worked on the mans temproal lobe in order to stop or slow the gap between the seizures.
However the surgeon was distressed to discover that the removal of the hippocampi had stripped Henry of his ability to form new memories.
He is stricken with renewed grief every time he learns of his mother's death. The grief is short-lived, however, as the substance of the news soon slips from the feeble grasp of his "working memory."
Similar cases of anterograde amnesia have appeared over the years, often caused by Korsakoff's Syndrome, a thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency brought on by chronic alcoholism, malnutrition, eating disorders, or poisoning.
From reading this I have found out that this type of illness is caused by the damaging or removal of the hippocampus which is used to convert STM into LTM. Here is a long but very intesting paragraph taken from the same site again. It tells us that although people with the illness dont seamed to remember events they are able to learn tasks over time, even if the people were experiencing them for the first time. There is also a sketch by "henry or H.M" which shows the actual living space of HM and then his interpritation of the space from his memory (which appently isn't able to encode new memories)
Though anterograde amnesiacs are blocked from storing new information, researchers were astonished to discover that subjects are nonetheless capable of mastering new and complex tasks over time. Subjects who repeatedly practice skills such as backwards writing or guitar-playing can demonstrate measurable improvement, though in each instance the subject believes that he or she is attempting the task for the first time. This insight cast serious doubt upon the long-held belief that all memory is stored in a common mental reservoir. It also demonstrated that procedural memory– the "how to" memory of motor skills– is not governed by the exact same circuitry as episodic memory (autobiographical events) and semantic memory (general knowledge and facts). A diagram of one of Henry M's living spaces, and his depiction of it three years after moving out.Additionally, some patients have experienced the Tetris Effect hours or days after playing the game during experiments; they describe vivid dreams of falling Tetris shapes though they possess no conscious memory of the game's existence.
I enjoyed reading this artical as it had a character and short stories about HM which made it intesting to read. At the end it referances to 'Memento'. An I have learnt about 'reverse chronology' which I knew myself was in the film but not the name. HM was one of the first people scienctists looked a to learn about this form of animisa.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7584970 An audio clip of HM can be found from research news. It explains the artical as in audio which interviews with HM where scientists ask him questions. It also goes into more depth about the sciences of memories, which I have already looked at. Dr Corkin's (the doctor who spent decades studying with HM) paper can be found at this link http://homepage.mac.com/sanagnos/corkin2002.pdf. After reading the paper I have found out that the removed size of the hippocampi is related to the servarity of the amnisa. Also memory is encoded with this type of amnisa its problems with its retreaval which causes the problems. People with this problem do not loose there idenity like with other illness's, they have a sence of who they are, due to them being able to remember past events.
Searching the links at the bottom of the page I discovered another story from a broadsheet about an extreme case of amnisa which linked more than one type. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1394684,00.html
Deborah describes it, 'melts like snow, leaving not a trace'
I really enjoyed this idea of the memory being snow, a solid stable object at its current state but eventualy destined to be reduced to water, not a trace of what it once was. I really should think of things like this to show memory, as memories are hard to show for what they are.
How do we know what we are seeing is a memory or reality?
The artical referances to 'Hades' rivers from greek mythology which one of the rivers was forgetfulness and memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemosyne
Dead souls drank from Lethe so they would not remember their past lives when reincarnated. Initiates were encouraged to drink from the river Mnemosyne when they died, instead of Lethe.
further reading of the artical I noticed something which I had overlooked. This was the way that people with this problem of recalling information from LTM recorded there events. Like with the film 50 First Dates the main character keeps a diary of events she wants to remember and how she felt at that time. This is something I could look at further, the methord of recording events, and if changing these would effect how a person would look at the world.
What if you could 'program' a persons idenity by writing their memories for them?
Here is a paragraph from the artical which shows the diary of someone with amnisia.
His diaries show his desperation and also the articulate man he had so recently been. '7.46am: I wake for the first time. 7.47am: This illness has been like death till NOW. All senses work. 8.07am: I AM awake. 8.31am: Now I am really, completely awake. 9.06am: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake. 9.34am: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.'
This was taken later down it talks about the soul and that the deisease has taken away his soul. This is another thing I could look at although it would largely get confused with death.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks asks in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 'What sort of life (if any), what sort of world, what sort of self, can be preserved in a man who has lost the greater part of his memory and, with this, his past, and his moorings in time?' Of a patient with similar symptoms to Clive, he writes: 'One tended to think of him, instinctively, as a spiritual casualty - a lost soul. Was it possible that he had really been "de-souled" by the disease?'
I looked at the tetris effect quickly after reading about HM and found that people with retrograde amnisa dreapt of tetris shapes after playing the game alot. This again links somehow with being able to recall memories inside a dream but not while in a conouse awakened state. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
I have just been looking on youtube and found adocumentry about Clive Wearing. Part 1a
Part 1b
Part 2a
Part 2b
Part 2c
Part 2d
There is a newer documenty which I found a 9min clip of on youtube.
So what is Retrograde Amnesia? Taken from wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrograde_amnesia
Retrograde amnesia is a form of amnesia where someone will be unable to recall events that occurred before the onset of amnesia.
Retrograde amnesia is caused by trauma that results in brain injury. Critical details of the physical changes in the brain that cause retrograde amnesia are still unknown. Retrograde amnesia is often temporally graded, meaning that remote memories are more easily accessible than events occurring just prior to the trauma.
Both Anterograde Amnesia and Retrograde Amnesia often occur together and the Clive Wearing case is one of the worst examples of this.
A documentry film which aired on channel 4 called 'Unknown White Male' explored how a man woke up on the subway with a headache and had no recolection of himself or his past. He was able to form new memories but everything sentimental to him was gone. He had no idea who he was, no idenity. Here is the youtube clip of the trailer for Unknown White Male.
Taken from http://unknownwhitemale.co.uk/medical/amnesia.php I found this to be intresting in how it is seen to be "convenient" to loose your memory. This makes me think back to the memory pill fiction I found and look at some of the questions and also why it is important for us to keep our memories. I could see it being convenient if the person has a 'bad' life and wanted a fresh start.The site also looks at verious movies which are based around the theme of memory. It can be very convenient to loose your memory. We all have things in our past that we'd like to forget; most of us, at some time or other, have entertained the fantasy of having a second chance at life, of wiping the slate clean and starting again. We only have someone's word for it that they can't remember who they are, and as extreme amnesia may not have an obvious or identifiable cause and tends not to affect learned skills like language use, car driving, or piano playing, it can often seem implausible even when it's completely genuine.
Image taken from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/healthmain.html?in_article_id=454585&in_page_id=1774
Information taken from http://www.deltaflow.com/?p=402 Videos can be found here http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/21/memory_drug? But these were offline when I wanted to watch them.
60 minutes has a report (A Pill to Forget?) (Video’s here) on a drug that can erase memories. Propranolol is a drug that (among other things) seems to erase link between an intense emotional event and the memory. Psychiatrists hope to treat patients suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (i.e. victims of war, rape, or accidents). Usually if someone has experienced a traumatic event and then, years later, sees or hears something that reminds them of that experience, then the emotions from the trauma come back in full force. However, the drug shows promise that it can remove these painful memories.
Looking at the site it doesn’t seam professional to me and as I read I get the impression it is just some made up drug, it talks about death and memories after death. I’m not sure how to react at the moment but I shall look further into this to find out if it is fact or merely fiction.
Opponents of the drug believe that our memories make us who we are. Erasing painful memories would rob us of the chance to become better people. They also fear the drug will be used recreationally, to erase minor unpleasant or embarrassing moments from our memory.
I thought this was really interesting saying memories make us who we are and removing them will remove a part of our person. The chance to become a better person through bad memories is good argument against the pill (if it is real).
I looked into this so called pill and it was called http://www2.netdoctor.co.uk/medicines/100002177.html
It works by blocking communication paths in the body like most drugs and the advantages are mainly a lower blood pressure. Reading through the text there was nothing about memory and the loss of it and I tried looking for side effect but I couldn't find any relating to memory.
I then looked into PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) on wiki and found this little paragraph.
Propranolol, a beta blocker which appears to inhibit the formation of traumatic memories by blocking adrenaline's effects on the amygdala, has been used in an attempt to reduce the impact of traumatic events.
I found some more informative text from here http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/memory_drugs_sd.html
Memory-altering drug research is currently focused on propranolol, one of several so-called beta blockers widely used to reduce blood pressure, treat abnormal heart rhythms and prevent migraines. The brand name for propranolol is Inderal. Other beta blocker brand names are Inderide, Innopran XL, Betachron E-R, Kerlone, Lopressor, Tenormin, Toprol XL, Visken and Zebeta.
Beta blockers work by "blocking" the simulative influence of stress hormones – specifically adrenaline – upon the body, relaxing blood vessels and slowing nerve impulses inside the heart.
Experiments indicate propranolol also blocks the effect of adrenaline upon areas of the brain involved in memory formation, including the amygdala. It seems to disconnect emotion from memory.
Cahill and McGaugh then presented the second, emotionally upsetting story with slides to a third group of volunteers who were given a standard dose of propranolol or endurol (another beta blocker). Their memories, when tested three weeks later, were "just like that of subjects who had received the boring story," said McGaugh. It seems the pill is taken when the memories at that time want to be forgotten for the present time. I think I need to look into PTSD treatments to fully understand how the beta blockers work to block memories from the past. Subjects remembered the story, but without any emotional depth.
Such findings suggest an obvious potential therapeutic benefit: If people who have just experienced a traumatic event could be given a memory-dampening drug like propranolol, they might avoid suffering later psychic damage, such as post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.
This would seem to suggest that it would be taken just after an event which would not want to be remembering on an emotional level. The users don’t forget the event but they lost the emotions which came from the event. Examples would be in war or where disturbing events occur, mostly involving death.
In its report, the council worries that dampening painful memories – or in the future, erasing them altogether – may disconnect people from reality or their true selves. I found this little statement quite interesting looking at the world as a reality and removing something from your memory alters a persons sense of reality and identity. Each person must have their own sense of what reality is, but their own memories must form this reality. I could possibly take some ideas this way and look at how a memory would affect the perception of what a reality is. I have already looked a little into dreaming which in itself is a non-reality created around events, ideas, emotions and memories.
"It's the morning-after pill for just about anything that produces regret, remorse, pain, or guilt," said Dr. Leon Kass
I also liked the idea that it could be seen as a disposable pill, linking with the removal of an event which shouldn't if didn't want to happen. I can see the pills place in society for example a rape victim who shouldn't have to remember what they went thought. There is no learning taken from the experience the victim has to hold for the rest of their lives. Some people get deeply depressed by the emotions they feel and simply cannot live out their lives like before the event. The drug would allow them to continue their lives with ought the emotional baggage from what happened.
For example, the council posited, what if somebody committed an act of violence and then took propranolol to dull the emotional impact. Would they come to think of violence as more tolerable than it really is?
Here is another situation which is against the use of the drug. By dulling the emotional response a crime committed this could allow the crime to be repeated without any regrets or doubts from the emotions remembered from the previous crime.
McGaugh and similarly minded researchers doubt science will ever be able to probe an individual's mind, precisely plucking and altering specific memories like they do in movies. The brains of real people are far too complex. Memories aren't single molecules or neurons, but intricate patterns of biochemical and electrical energy occurring in various parts of the brain and different levels of the mind.
Anderson and Gabrieli discovered that when people consciously determine not to think about something they do not want to remember, their ability to recall that memory gradually weakens. Call it motivated forgetting.
Prospects of a pill-to-forget hitting the market anytime soon are nil.
Again taken from the same site it tells us that reparation allows the forgetting of a memory. Reparation allows us to encode for long term memory but it works the other way around too. Another small statement tells us that a pill to forget is just a science and will not become commercialized any time soon.
After a bit more research I found out diazepam a drug marketed as Valium also has memory impairing effects.
taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valium
Benzodiazepines such as diazepam impair learning and memory via their action on benzodiazepine receptors which causes a dysfunction in the cholinergic neuronal system. I came across BBC news which talks about the opposite of a pill which allows the 'boost' of memory. taken from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4539551.stm
The article explains that is the drug causes the reactions in the brain to occur which usually fails with sleep. They cause neutrons to communicate with each other better. This allows for better learning and enhances memory. The carried out an experiment which people too either a dummy pill or the real pill and then were tested throughout the night. The people who took the pill performed the tasks much better than the people who took the dummy pill.
Taken from find articles http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_6_21/ai_62277748 I found a nice question which I have already been asking myself throughout this pill research. I thought it would be a good idea to document these and reference back to them when generating more focused ideas about my project.
What if you could swallow a little pill that gave you a photographic memory, the ability to form long-term memories instantly?
This is something I would like to look at in my work. There is an advertisement for a glasses company in which a man is walking through the woods and everything his eyes capture fall at his feet in the form of a Polaroid. I have thought of using something like this which might look into Photographic memory as a theme. Using a Polaroid camera myself you can create some interesting images. With analog photography it’s all in the chemicals, like memory it isn't perfect. Using expired film gives unexpected results like an unsure memory. Colours are not what they are in reality, as a memory which is unsure of the colour of a car, clothing or street sign.
From the same article there was an experiment with flies which explored the ability to speed up memory being encoded into long term memory with little repetition needed.
Yin and Tully tested the flies by placing them in the middle of a double-ended tube and blowing tennis-shoe scent in one end and licorice scent in the other. Flies with normal levels of the memory protein needed to be zapped 10 times before they stopped moving toward the licorice scent. In other words, they could build the neural connections needed for an "Avoid licorice!" memory, but it required spaced repetition--just as normal humans must say a sentence over and over again to memorize it. Yin and Tully then tested a strain with low levels of memory protein and found that those poor flies never made the structural changes necessary for lasting memory. No matter how many shocks they received, they went for licorice scent as often as they went for tennis-shoe scent.
The flies with an overabundance of memory protein formed long-term memory instantly. After only one trial, they knew to avoid licorice the rest of their lives. Tully points out that these flies haven't gotten smarter--they'll never solve quadratic equations. Extra memory protein simply accelerates the pace of memorization by eliminating the need for repetition.
Image taken from http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1800019594/photo/495777 Showing how information is transferred into the longterm memory in the film 'The Matrix'
What would the world be like if you could take a pill and learn without repetition? The Matrix uses a way of sending information into our Semantic and Procedural memory which in almost instant. Would this pill strive to be more like the futuristic feels we see today? How long would it take a child to pass though school?
I have previously come across the amygdalae in the brain which deals with emotions and some aspects of memory. I found out that emotions can effect how things are learnt, and the intencity of the emotions allows for a better more accurate memory. I now want to see if there are other ways emotions can effect memory.
Taken from http://www.memory-key.com/NatureofMemory/emotion.htm The memory of strongly emotional images and events may be at the expense of other information. Thus, you may be less likely to remember information if it is followed by something that is strongly emotional. This effect appears to be stronger for women.
Pleasant emotions appear to fade more slowly from our memory than unpleasant emotions, but among those with mild depression, unpleasant and pleasant emotions tend to fade evenly, while older adults seem to regulate their emotions better than younger people, and may encode less information that is negative.
Mood congruence: whereby we remember events that match our current mood thus, when we're depressed, we tend to remember negative events. Mood dependence: which refers to the fact that remembering is easier when your mood at retrieval matches your mood at encoding (thus, your chances of remembering an event or fact are greater if you evoke the emotional state you were in at the time of experiencing the event or learning the fact)
There were afew intresting things I found on this site one being that women more more likely to not remember things after something emotional. I would link this to a hormanal thing, there hormones and effection the emotions of a person, which then effects the memory. I also found the mood dependance quite intresting and I could relate to what it was saying. Memories are easier to remember when you are in the emotional state when the memory was encoded.
Looking at wiki it had a theory that evolution is responsable for emotions effecting our memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_memory
The activity of emotionally enhanced memory retention can be linked to human evolution; during early development, responsive behavior to environmental events would have progressed as a process of trial and error. Survival depended on behavioral patterns that were repeated or reinforced through life and death situations. Through evolution, this process of learning became genetically embedded in humans and all animal species in what is known as "fight or flight" instinct. Artificially inducing this instinct through traumatic physical or emotional stimuli essentially creates the same physiological condition that heightens memory retention by exiting neuro-chemical activity affecting areas of the brain responsible for encoding and recalling memory.
Contextual effects occur as a result of the degree of similarity between the encoding context and the retrieval context of an emotional dimension. The main findings are that the current mood we are in affects what is attended, encoded and ultimately retrieved, as reflected in two similar but subtly different effects: the mood congruence effect and mood-state dependent retrieval.
I found this artical on science daily which goes into depth about a study of emotion and the brain this is taken from that artical.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/06/040610081107.htm
Second, to delineate the contribution of the emotion and memory-related regions during emotional memory formation, the study used precise anatomical methods, which involved tracing of these regions on each subject's brain image. Thus, it was possible to precisely localize the signal coming from anatomically proximal brain regions. As expected, analysis of the behavioral data revealed evidence that the memories of emotional images were more strongly encoded than the neutral ones. And importantly, the brain scans showed that the emotional memories evoked activity in the amygdala as well as the "medial temporal lobe memory" structures. Specifically, these structures include the hippocampus and associated regions. Moreover, according to Dolcos, the analysis revealed a significant correlation between the strength of activity in the emotion- and memory-related brain regions.
This shows proof that emotions effect memory. This is lifted from http://sciencenewsmagazine.org/articles/20031108/fob5.asp
Emotionally charged events often seem particularly memorable. But this vivid recall may come at a cost. A new study in England suggests that the same biological process that aids recall of emotional experiences also blocks memories of what happened just before those arousing occurrences took place.
This is important and can effect my work a lot. The event which happen before an hightened emotions is blocked to create a more intence memory. When i first did my burst shot experiments i wanted to progess further by starting lifting frames out of the animation and seeing what effect that has on the piece and how people would precive this.
I have found a second piece of text which talks about an experiment in which women are twice as likely for forget memory after an emotional event, again taken from http://sciencenewsmagazine.org/articles/20031108/fob5.asp
Overall, men and women recalled the emotional words much more often than they did the neutral words. Moreover, the poorest memory occurred for neutral words that were presented immediately before the disturbing words. Women forgot those words twice as often as men did.
By learning about emotions of memory I have wondered what would the effect be if drugs are used to not aid or paralize the memory from working like I have previously looked into but if the emotions are block, which would then effect memory.
Emotions in memory seams to be a double edges sword, you get a stronger memory of the emotional event but what happened before is usualy a blur or forgot all together at the expence of a highted memory.
Image taken from http://www.deltaflow.com/?p=402
On this blog I have found a pill which claims can remove memories, but I have decided to make a new post for this as it is seperate from emotions of memory although it links into it.
image taken from http://www.ahaf.org/alzdis/about/brain_headBorder.jpg
Data also taken from http://www.ahaf.org/alzdis/about/brain_headBorder.jpg
The image on the left is the outside of the brain, viewed from the side, showing the major lobes (frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital) and the brain stem structures (pons, medulla oblongata, and cerebellum).
The image on the right is a side-view showing the location of the limbic system inside the brain. The limbic system consists of a number of structures, including the fornix, hippocampus, cingulate gyrus, amygdala, the parahippocampal gyrus and parts of the thalamus.The hippocampus is one of the first areas affected by Alzheimer's disease. As the disease progresses, damage extends throughout the lobes.
There are 3 areas of the brain which are
Amygdala – limbic structure involved in many brain functions, including emotion, learning and memory. It is part of a system that processes "reflexive" emotions like fear and anxiety.
Limbic system – a group of interconnected structures that mediate emotions, learning and memory.
Temporal lobe – processes hearing, memory and language functions.
I found some artical at http://biology.about.com/b/2004/12/09/brain-anatomy-hippocampus.htm
which tells us thatthe hippocampus is the part of the brain that is involved in memory forming, organizing, and storing. It is particularly important in forming new memories and connecting emotions and senses, such as smell and sound, to memories.
This makes me question the integrity of the other site so I need to find some more evidence. What is the hippocampus?
Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampus The hippocampus is a part of the forebrain, located in the medial temporal lobe. It forms a part of the limbic system and plays a part in long term memory and spatial navigation. Humans and other mammals have two hippocampi, one in each side of the brain. The name derives from its curved shape in coronal sections of the brain, which resembles a seahorse (Greek: hippos = horse, kampi = curve).
I have found out that it is just part of the Limbic System which is explained above. It was just a more accurate description of which part of the system focuses on memory. The hippocampus is still yet to be fully understood and we are unsure of its precise role.
Damage to the hippocampus usually results in profound difficulties in forming new memories (anterograde amnesia), and normally also affects access to memories prior to the damage (retrograde amnesia). Although the retrograde effect normally extends some years prior to the brain damage, in some cases older memories remain - this sparing of older memories leads to the idea that consolidation over time involves the transfer of memories out of the hippocampus to other parts of the brain.
I read this further down on wiki which tells us that this part of the brain has been seen to form new memories and not recall them. If this part of the brain is damaged it leads to new memories from being created. Like in the movie I have reviewed '50 First Dates' the main character can't form new memories after a day, this might have been due to damage in her hippocampus from a car accident.
London's taxi drivers must learn a large number of places — and know the most direct routes between them (they have to pass a strict test, The Knowledge, before being licensed to drive the famous black cabs). A study at University College London by Maguire, et al (2000) showed that part of the hippocampus is larger in taxi drivers than in the general public, and that more experienced drivers have bigger hippocampi.
I also found this quite interesting, that the hippocampi is larger in people who need to access large amounts of information on a regular basis, like a london taxi driver. I could use something like this in my work, maybe some style of photography showing the area of the brain enlarged, like a revirsed fish eye effect showing the center of the image to be large.
http://biology.about.com/library/organs/brain/blhippocam.htm Here i found a little list in bullet form about the
Function:
* Consolidation of New Memories
* Emotions
* Navigation
* Spatial Orientation
Location:
* The hippocampus is a horseshoe shaped sheet of neurons located within the temporal lobes and adjacent to the amygdala.
Image taken from http://www.technovelgy.com/graphics/content/hippocampus.jpg
What is the Temporal Lobe?
The superior temporal gyrus includes an area (within the Sylvian fissure) where auditory signals from the cochlea (relayed via several subcortical nuclei) first reach the cerebral cortex. This part of the cortex (primary auditory cortex) is involved in hearing. Adjacent areas in the superior, posterior and lateral parts of the temporal lobes are involved in high-level auditory processing. In humans this includes speech, for which the left temporal lobe in particular seems to be specialized. Wernicke's area, which spans the region between temporal and parietal lobes, plays a key role (in tandem with Broca's area, which is in the frontal lobe). The functions of the left temporal lobe are not limited to low-level perception but extend to comprehension, naming, verbal memory and other language functions. Sound processing is controlled by the temporal lobes- in the Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area.
There is nothing much about memory and the temporal lobe on wiki accept it tells us that tghe fuctions of the left side are linked with verbal memory and language. There is another parag
The medial temporal lobes (near the Sagittal plane that divides left and right cerebral hemispheres) are thought to be involved in episodic/declarative memory. Deep inside the medial temporal lobes, the hippocampi seem to be particularly important for memory function - particularly transference from short to long term memory and control of spatial memory and behavior.
This links into what i have already looked (the hippocampi) but i have found at that it is involed with episodic memory, which I previously looked at in LTM (long term memory) post.
What is the amygdalae? (taken from wiki)
The amygdalae are almond-shaped groups of neurons located deep within the medial temporal lobes of the brain in complex vertebrates, including humans. Shown in research to perform a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the amygdalae are considered part of the limbic system.
The amygdalae also are involved in the modulation of memory consolidation. Following any learning event, the long-term memory for the event is not instantaneously formed. Rather, information regarding the event is slowly assimilated into long-term storage over time, a process referred to as memory consolidation.
During the consolidation period, the memory can be modulated. In particular, it appears that emotional arousal following the learning event influences the strength of the subsequent memory for that event. Greater emotional arousal following a learning event enhances a person's retention of that event. Experiments have shown that administration of stress hormones to mice immediately after they learn something enhances their retention when they are tested two days later.
I find this really intesting, i know that emotions enchanced memory. As a widely used example a lot of people have a stong memory of 9/11 when the twin towers fell. People can tell you where they where and what they were doing, even what they were wearing or eating when the event happened. This is due to an emotion repsonse enhancing the memory. Looking at the encahncement of memory is just another area I have overlooked untill now but could go onto my research list to look further into it.
The amygdalae, especially the basolateral nuclei, are involved in mediating the effects of emotional arousal on the strength of the memory for the event, as shown by many laboratories including that of James McGaugh. These laboratories have trained animals on a variety of learning tasks and found that drugs injected into the amygdala after training affect the animals' subsequent retention of the task. These tasks include basic classical conditioning tasks such as inhibitory avoidance, where a rat learns to associate a mild footshock with a particular compartment of an apparatus, and more complex tasks such as spatial or cued water maze, where a rat learns to swim to a platform to escape the water. If a drug that activates the amygdalae is injected into the amygdalae, the animals had better memory for the training in the task. If a drug that inactivates the amygdalae is injected, the animals had impaired memory for the task.
I find this VERY intresting, the fact that taking drugs can enhance your memory. I dont know the side effects of the drug but to me it seams like an amazing idea to use it. I can think of many purposes where lives could be saved if the drug was used with teaching, an example would be the training of soldiers or even more so people within the medical profession to help them have a better memory of the tasks they were to perform. Children in school would have better memories of there teaching, surly allowing faster advancement.
Evidence from work with humans indicates that the amygdala plays a similar role. Amygdala activity at the time of encoding information correlates with retention for that information. However, this correlation depends on the relative "emotionalness" of the information. More emotionally-arousing information increases amygdalar activity, and that activity correlates with retention.
