Active Memory Research Articles

Memory Loss and the False Memory Controversy

Memory loss is a broad concept that has various specific deficiencies that can occur due to either physiological or psychological events. However, the focus of this paper is on the psychological effects. For instance, if a person experiences a psychologically traumatic event in their life, loss of memory may be the way in which one deals with this experience. Recently, there has been a growing controversy regarding the validity of repressed memory and recovered memory therapy. Specifically, it has been debated whether newly remembered information is truly repressed memories of actual traumatic experiences or false memories of abuse that did not occur. Psychologists working with patients suffering from memory loss must deal with broad legal, ethical, and treatment dilemmas.

Substrate defects affecting gate oxide integrity

During the past 20 years, there have been several breakthroughs regarding the research on grown-in defects in Czochralski silicon (CZ-Si) for commercial use. The presence of oxide defects originating in CZ-Si was first reported in 1979, and it was soon proposed that they could be eliminated by sacrificial oxidation, as well as by nitrogen annealing or hydrogen annealing. In 1990, crystal-originated particles were reported, but the origin of the defects remained unclear. Octahedral void defects were found under oxide defects in 1995, and in 1996, octahedral void defects were also found in bulk CZ-Si. A series of these discoveries lead some manufacturers of Si metal-oxide-semiconductor large-scale integrated circuits to widely recognize that the octahedral void defects are closely related to the failures of the actual dynamic random access memories they manufactured. The principal factor for the generation of gate-oxide defects may be oxide thinning at the corners and/or edges of the voids (as a geometrical effect). Another factor may be due to some impurities in the voids reducing the dielectric strength of gate oxides, even though the presence of impurities that may have accumulated in the void has not been directly observed. However, we have found two kinds of thin marks located around the void defects after oxidation, and we assume that the marks are closely related to the impurities originating in the void defects.

Distinguishing between Memory Illusions and Actual Memories Using Phenomenological Measurements and Explicit Warnings

Previous research has demonstrated that the false memory effect is robust and that false memories are essentially indistinguishable from memories for events that actually occurred. The current study used several techniques intended to eliminate false memories (source monitoring decisions, confidence ratings, remember/know judgments, and explicit warnings). A robust false memory effect was found in each experiment. However, participants were able to differentiate false memories and actual memories when using specific phenomenological tasks. The current findings provide insight into basic human memory processes.

Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (review)

Reviewed by: Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries John Limon Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Laura Otis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. 297. $37.50. “Organic memory” is a tidy phrase for a messy confusion of what can be inherited and what can be remembered. Especially in the last third of the last century, according to Laura Otis’s [End Page 164] compendious study, scientists and litterateurs alike were preoccupied with bad analogies of genetic inheritance, cultural heritage, and memory. Lump them sufficiently, and peoples (defined by geography and /or culture and /or race and /or language) may be conceived as corporate people; just as human individuals are integrated by personal memories, nations may be united by racial ones. Not for nothing would the portentous muddles of organic memory seduce German polymaths. But wherever national identity was at issue in the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, as for example in Spain after 1898, the organic memory idea was a temptation. Otis’s study is largely a history of that idea, born out of Lamarckian biology and Haeckel’s law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; refined at the border of experiment and prophecy by such thinkers as Ewald Hering and Théodule Ribot; adapted for fictional purposes by Emile Zola and ironized by Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy; translated into twentieth-century intellectual culture by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. (I have named only a few of the major players in Organic Memory. Otis’s book is nothing if not populated.) The book crosses several frontiers (national, epochal, disciplinary) with nonchalant courage. And Otis’s scholarship excavates a deep source of material on questions of transcendent modern importance. What is the relationship of individuals and nations? Can memory be located in a place? Can spatialized memories find their way to the genetic blueprint of bodies? All literary criticism must now, by a universally observed rule, pass as metacriticism; my only basic reservation about Otis’s book is that on that level, I am not sure what she has shown. Otis opens Organic Memory quoting an incredulous challenge from a graduate student in neuroscience: “Why would anyone want to study the literature from past times?” (vii) Metacriticism, apparently, is the first order of business; the working hypotheses of Organic Memory are that we study literature because it foregrounds metaphors that inform all thinking, even scientific thinking, and that we study “literature from past times” because the past hardly ever does us the favor of dying. Of course, some ideas do fade away, scientific ones, preëminently—for example, organic memory. But they fade away only as science. Done in as science by their essential metaphoricity, they may linger elsewhere precisely by virtue of metaphoric power. The study of literature brings that hidden source of power to light, where it can do us less damage. At the beginning and end of her book, Otis is explicit about what damage organic memory has already done: Nazis and Serbs are much on her mind. The unexamined assumption (barely qualified on a couple of occasions) is that bad ideas have bad consequences. But implicit throughout the book is a lesson murkier than the one Otis herself infers from it. Part of the problem is that “organic memory” conflates, I think, two ideas: first that genetic inheritance should be conceived as a kind of memory; second, that actual memories are transmitted genetically. The former is probably more conducive to racist appropriation: racial similarity would seem, in its terms, to imply national identity. The latter, Lamarckian conception could be essentially inclusive, since hundreds of years of shared memories (as by Germans and Jews) would begin to produce genetic overlap. No wonder that two German Jews, Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, are near the center of Otis’s story. And the presence of Freud (with Jung—but not as distinct from Jung as one had thought) at the culmination of the narrative makes it clear that exclusive conceptions of race did not have to be, by any logical entailment, essential to conceptions of organic memory. Racial memories might be shared...

Suggestibility and Repressed Memories of Abuse: A Survey of Psychotherapists' Beliefs

The mental health field is deeply divided in its views regarding the possibility of creating false memories of sexual abuse through suggestive procedures. Psychotherapists in clinical practice were surveyed regarding their views on memory and hypnosis in order to assess how their perspectives might influence their clinical methods. Survey data regarding hypnosis and suggestibility indicate that while psychotherapists largely view hypnosis favorably, they often do so on the basis of misinformation. A significant number of psychotherapists erroneously believe, for example, that memories obtained through hypnosis are more likely to be accurate than those simply recalled, and that hypnosis can be used to recover accurate memories even from as far back as birth. Such misinformed views can lead to misapplications of hypnosis when attempting to actively recover memories of presumably repressed episodes of abuse, possibly resulting in the recovery of suggested rather than actual memories.

Social schemata of peripheral changes in emotion.

Psychophysiological research failed to establish consistent physiological patterns differentiating emotion. Recent data showed that people verbally report experiencing peripheral changes that differ among emotions. The present studies tested the hypothesis that these reports originate in social schemata. Study 1 showed that Ss' reports of peripheral changes experienced during actual emotion do not differ from those defined in social schemata. Studies 2 and 3 showed that these schemata are similar across cultures. Overall, these data suggest that (a) people can directly access schemata about peripheral changes in emotion, (b) people are likely to do so when they believe to be reporting actual memories of such changes, and (c) the specific patterns revealed by past research may reflect prototypical knowledge of emotion. Finally, the data highlight the various peripheral patterns as they exist in schematic knowledge of emotion.

Remembering and repeating in multiple personality

Summary This paper is a case-history of a student in his early twenties tortured by different personalities of different ages and sexes vying for control of his body. Guilt over an incestuous relationship with his mother is uncovered and understood in the context of his whole life. Confusion between memories of fantasies, memories of sleep dreams, memories of daydreams, and memories of actual memories are described, the elucidation of which lead to clearer thinking and memory, and more tolerance for the previously distorted affectladen situations of his past. Thus his belief that he was experimented on in an alien spaceship becomes the memory of an operating-room diagnostic experience. A hypothesis is put forward that the separate personalities in the multiple personality are not simply the products of ego splits, but are at the instant they are formed a ‘doubling’ of the personality that is being copied. Immediately thereafter, splitting mechanisms create differences between the two separate personalitie...

Overview

Your program discussion this morning about the Mexico City earthquake brings back some recent and actual vivid memories. I was in Mexico City last fall. I went there within two weeks of the earth tremor that hit. I was there in my capacity as the Director in the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and AID. Several weeks later, I joined FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with its full load of domestic emergencies and various systems and plans to meet those crises. Some of you may ask, well, is there any major difference, basic difference, between coping with a disaster overseas and disasters that occur here in the United States? And, of course, you also, I suspect, would be interested to find out how I connect those disasters with the purpose of this conference, which is how to deal with the mass casualty incidents. Obviously, there are differences in all nations.

The Use and Misuse of Hypnosis in Court

Hypnosis may be helpful in the context of criminal investigation and under circumstances involving functional memory loss. Hypnosis is not useful in assuring truthfulness since, particularly in a forensic context, subjects may simulate hypnosis and are able to lie wilfully even in deep hypnosis; most troublesome, actual memories cannot be distinguished from confabulations-pseudo-memories where plausible fantasy has replaced gaps in recall-either by the subject or by the hypnotist without full and independent corroboration. While potentially useful to refresh witnesses' and victims' memories to facilitate eyewitness identification, the procedure is relatively safe and appropriate only when neither the subject nor the authorities nor the hypnotist has any preconceptions about the events under investigation. If such preconceptions do exist, hypnosis may readily cause the subject to confabulate the person who is suspected into his hypnotically enhanced memories. These pseudo memories, originally developed i...

The Unknown Co-Founders of Buddhism

Research in old Eastern literary remains may yet come upon materials throwing new light on the beginning and first development of the movement which, in course of time, came to be called Buddhism. The only works, as yet in our possession, in which we may discern certain archaic records of this most early stage are, as we know, the first part or Mahā-vagga of the Vinaya Piṭaka and one or two portions of the five Nikāyas. As chronicles these do not give us all the light we fain would have. Those, especially of the Vinaya are a number of fragments relating to what led up to the founding of the “Order”, and to certain early stages in its progress. The narrative is always in very slight outline; much would seem either to have been forgotten, or suppressed, as not relevant to the formal registering of some Vinaya statute, and why it came to be. We get the impression that we are reading about persons and places which, for the compilers, are just names, bound up, it is clear, with an ancient and venerated tradition, but not belonging to any actual memories either in their possession or even in their own preceding generations. The places named do not seem to be places known. A few persons emerge, two in high, a few others in low relief. These are, respectively, the founder and his chief rival and adversary, then three laypatrons—two kings and a merchant—also the first layconvert, the founder's family, a few other converts, lastly a few associates who here and there appear as fellow-teachers.