Memory and H.M.

Memory.  What is the dictionary definition of this word?  Every person knows what it is.  Experiences and how they are stored in the brain.  There’s short-term memory, long-term memory, working memory, implicit memory, explicit memory, semantic memory… just to name a few.  This next story is a story about H.M. A man who lived for 30+ years lived with severe epileptic sesures all his life.  Doctors thought that they could perform an operation to stop his epileptic sesures.  Little did they know that what was going to happen as a result of that surgery would change the study of memory and the brain forever.

The doctors performed what is anatomically termed a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy. In layman’s terms, the bottom portions of his temporal (side) lobes, were removed toward the middle. Due to this operation, H.M.’s epileptic sesures stopped. Yes, the operation was a success. H.M.’s IQ rose from 104 to 118. However, there was one major side effect H.M. now suffered from anterograde amnesia -he could no longer form new long-term memories. H.M. could walk into a room, meet someone, turn around and stare at the wall, and them turn back around again, and re-meet that person having no recollection of the first meeting, though it happened moments before. But the story of H.M. does not stop there, H.M. was found to be able to make new memories after all; just not the ones you and I are used to acknowledging. H.M. could still learn skills, on a test called a mirror drawing test it was proven that H.M. could learn a skill of drawing a complex figure and the more times that he was exposed to this behavior, the better at it he got. He was able to learn things unconciously or what psychologists call implicitly. If you asked him to do the mirror drawing test he would admit that he had never done it before, but he could perform the task with no errors after several tries, and this could be repeated days later with improved accuracy.

Based on this evidence doctors, neroscientists, and psychologists were able to pursue memory in a new way. They realized that memory is not located in just one part of the brain. Research found that memory is located all throughout the brain; in areas that were active when the experience/task was activated. Thanks to H.M. the concept of memory changed forever. The contribution he made is still being studied today, 50 years later.

Cognition

What the heck is cognition???  Well, simply it is thinking.  Referring to all mental activities such as understanding, communicating, remembering and processing.  Concepts form that arrange our individual worlds, solve problems, and allow us to make decisions. 

Mental groupings, such as recognizing patterns of certain things, similar people, events, and objects -this is called the formation of concepts.  The concept “car” could be a variety of different things such as a Honda Civic or a Dodge Neon, a really tiny car, or a box car, a sports car, or even a Hummer.  If concepts didn’t exist, there would have to be a different word for every single thing!  The word “car” means a different thing to each and every person.  If there was no concept of car, then if someone said, “peel the fruit”  it would be quite confusing.  Which fruit is it of which they speak?

Another interesting aspect of cognition is the human mind’s ability to solve problems.  Trial and error is one way to get through a problem.  Also, there are algorithms -step-by-step procedures that guarantee a solution.  Trying to find another word using all the letters in MOLPERB, using algorithms one would try each letter in a different position resulting is some 908,874 times trying different positions of letters.  This would be tiring.  So to make things easier, simple strategies are often used, called heuristics.  Just rearranging the letters MOLPERB -excluding letter combinations such as a “P” by a “B.” Interesting, no?

Another problem-solving strategy is insight.  Which is a sudden flash of inspiration.  A sudden realization of the solution to the problem at hand.  Insight brings a sense of satisfaction and happiness.  Jokes are enjoed when people suddenly realize an unexpected ending or a double meaning.  Here’s a joke that illustrates the sudden leap to a new perspective, rated funniest among 2 million ratings or 40,000 submitted jokes, in an Internet humor study co-sponsored by Richard Wiseman (2002) and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.  “A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground.  He doesn’t seem to be breathing, his eyes rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator:  ‘My friend is dead! What can I do?’ The operator, in a calm soothing voice says:  ‘Just take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.’ There is silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line: ‘OK, now what?’ “

Now, decision making and judgement forming, -questions form, humans follow intuition.  Using the automatic information processing, intuitive judgements are formed instantaneously.  Apparently, decisions come from guessing things right, but mostly… intuition.

Essence

The essential matters of the subject of psychology are simply infinite.  There are many different things of psychology that make a difference -cognition, memory, chemical functions, emotional happenings due to brain issues, are only just a few!  The brain is the central focus, but there are different things that it does and certain happenings that can effect those functions intending to be carried out by the brain.  The study of human behavior and mental processes are essential to human life -to know what the control system is doing at this moment in time can reveal many things about how a person is -or should be- and the health of a person.

What the heck are dreams?  What the heck is dejavu??  “The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”  -Carl Jung a famous Swiss psychologist.  Here this psychologist takes apart the meaning of a dream to the best of his knowledge at the time, which his birth was in the year of 1875.  He implied that dreams have deeper meanings dealing with what is inside of one’s soul and the deeper thoughts inside of one’s mind.  Not consciously, this is revealed to a person in their dreams but some or possibly even a lot of this information revealed in a night is unbenownst to the dreamer.  Remembering these dreams can help one to connect bits and pieces of things about themselves that they didn’t know or are epiphany worthy.  Carl Gustav Jung implied that while sleeping,the mind delves deep into the soul, into the very deep darkest depths of one’s mind or inner heart in the head (if that makes any sense) and pulls out a hidden truth or secret deep thought, and creates a part for it in one’s dream, to expose it to the dreamer.  A way to communicate something that this person really knows, but they haven’t thought about it deep enough and so it could seem like totally new information about oneself, but it is born in one’s own mind so it is information that has been looked over, but maybe not long or hard enough.  Why was this information pushed so far back into the mind?  Some may believe that their lives were just too busy to dwell on something like what they dreamed about; I think that it was something that they didn’t want to take care of at a time when they had time, it might have been just too big of an obstacle for the person to want to deal with.  Back to the point, it is unknown exactly what dreams are, or their exact purpose, but a possibility is that they expose secret hidden truths in the soul of a person, when their mind is in a complete relaxed state.  Attempting to understand dreams can be helpful to understand what a person’s inner voice is trying to tell that person.

Image

Here is am image of the brain in a creative state.  The mind is flourishing with knowledge.  This is a really cool image because it depicts a regular human being, a normal human body, neither man nor woman (although, maybe more of a man) and the mind’s fabrications effecting the outside world around the human.  Since the mind is huge and shiny, the draw of the image, it is oviously the main focus of this image.  The glow about the person shows how important and special, secretly eyecatching, the body really is.  The glow draws attention to the body and thus the mind of the person as well.  The waves around the person is possibly just a really entertaining or cool, wonderous, background that the creator of this image just picked, or it is portraying the mind and how the knowledge flows out and around the person thinking the thoughts that they are.  This image is mostlikely the color blue and shades of blue because blue is a neutral color between differing genders, but also probably way more importantly, a relaxing color.  It has an ominous feeling, this picture does, because of the blue colors.  The small white streams of color make it exciting and interesting, in my opinion.  The creator of this image probably wanted this picture to seem interesting, something that would make an onlooker stop for a moment and think about the real meaning of this image.  What does it mean?  What is it of?  Is it just some guy thinking, or existing with his brain functioning as he stands?  Or is it the mind’s effect on the world around oneself?  Is it possibly both of these theories??  Or maybe, even, neither of the ideas!?!

Personally, I believe (and hope maybe) that this image is of a person thinking and the thought waves are making a difference on the world around the person.  When people think of past experiences, their mind can change how it happened slightly, how it should have happened in their mind, or how it could’ve happened, or the worst case senario or the best case senario.  This process of changing memories of one’s mind is called reasoning and logic is the science of this very reasoning.  Thinking or thought is a process of the mind that involoves patern matching and recognition.  New experiences are judged against the old ones that are similar to the new ones and complete judgements about the situation are made.  The thought process is not too complex, if one is talking about memory, but it is somewhat difficult to describe to others in my words.  The website for this image here is:  www.nourfoundation.com/upload/IMG_375px/mind_over_matter02.jpg

Aiding others -helping

The study of the brain is beneficial to many different fields of knowledge, but mainly the psychiatric fields.  Such as a shink, or psychiatrist.  When analyzing how a person is feeling or how a person’s thought process is going by understanding somewhat of how the brain’s functions follow through.  One can know the physical things happening that might effect how the person is feeling.  The knowledge of knowing about how the brain works is also helpful to (on a broader scale) the healthcare field.  With this knowledge, doctors, medical scientists and biomedical engineers can use it to carry out their jobs.  The brain is a very important thing to everyone and understanding how it works is very helpful to humanity if one really thinks about it; it is key for human survival!!!  (the brain, that is, not knowledge of how the brain and mind work)

Inside the Mind

Focusing on how the brain works -the different messages sent from the brain to certain parts of the body and vise-versa.  How this whole process of sending messages from the brain works occupys a section of my own mind, getting to understand the concept is what I want to grasp.  How do people remember things?  Short-term memory, long-term memory, having something to do with memory receptors -how does the brain do it?  Comprehension!  How does the mind comprehend and understand thing-how things work, certain patterns recognized; is it easy to understand how comprehension works??  I have always wanted to know about the brain.  I’ve always wanted to understand how the brain remembers things and how flashback memories come to work.  How does the process of understanding new material come together and how do people think of certain things in the blink-of-an-eye?  Finding these things out is important to me because I want to know how I come to think; just how thoughts become thoughts.  The brain is an essential organ in the human and all other living organisms’ bodies.  It is the most important part, next to the heart, and without it, the body cannot function.  I want to learn about it because it is precious to life, and there are many unanswered questions about it, such as how do dreams work and why do dreams happen?  How is it possible to hypnotize the mind-what goes on in the mind when hypnotized?  This blog right here is unique because it will be full of information and it is written by a young person – in my point of view -and no two people are exactly the same, so it will be something new, and interesting.  I want to understand the brain and will post how I understand it, when I do.  This blog probably will not be boring -it will be awesome.  Written from the mind of me.