Recall Past Events Research Articles

Are neuronal activity-associated magnetic fields the physical base for memory?

Despite intensive investigation into the mechanisms underlying the memory process, the physical bases for this superior cognitive function remain elusive. Recall of past events and actions depends on the generation of complex memory carriers that would have to integrate many items of information. Some human memory processes, like contextual recall, work at such high speed and integrate such a large number of cortical neurons and neuronal networks that molecular mechanisms of information storage and synaptic transmission seem insufficient. This limitation argues against molecular information storage mechanisms as being truly effective carriers for the memory process. In this paper, I propose that any type of information can be stored in the form of `neuronal activity-associated magnetic fields' that would record information in much the same way as the magnetic tape of a tape recorder. Integration and/or combination of the neuronal activity-associated magnetic fields throughout the complex three-dimensional structure of the human cortex could provide a storage medium for high-speed processing and discrimination that would support the complexity of the human memory process.

Molecular mechanisms of memory retrieval.

Memory retrieval is a fundamental component or stage of memory processing. In fact, retrieval is the only possible measure of memory. The ability to recall past events is a major determinant of survival strategies in all species and is of paramount importance in determining our uniqueness as individuals. Most biological studies of memory using brain lesion and/or gene manipulation techniques cannot distinguish between effects on the molecular mechanisms of the encoding or consolidation of memories and those responsible for their retrieval from storage. Here we examine recent findings indicating the major molecular steps involved in memory retrieval in selected brain regions of the mammalian brain. Together the findings strongly suggest that memory formation and retrieval may share some molecular mechanisms in the hippocampus and that retrieval initiates extinction requiring activation of several signaling cascades and protein synthesis.

Participation of hippocampal metabotropic glutamate receptors, protein kinase A and mitogen-activated protein kinases in memory retrieval

The ability to recall past events is a major determinant of survival strategies in all species and is of paramount importance in determining our uniqueness as individuals. In contrast to memory formation, the information about the molecular mechanisms of memory retrieval is surprisingly scarce and fragmentary. Here we show that pretest inhibition of the specific upstream activator of mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase, or of protein kinase A in the hippocampus, blocked retrieval of long-term memory for an inhibitory avoidance task, a hippocampal-dependent learning task. An activator of protein kinase A enhanced retrieval. Mitogen-activated protein kinase activation increased in the hippocampus during retrieval, while protein kinase A activity remained unchanged. Pretest intrahippocampal blockade of metabotropic glutamate receptors or α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolone propionic acid/kainate receptors, but not N-methyl- d-aspartate receptors or calcium/calmodulin dependent-protein kinase II, impaired retrieval. Thus, recall of inhibitory avoidance activates mitogen-activated protein kinase, which is necessary, along with metabotropic glutamate receptors, α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolone propionic acid/kainate receptors, and protein kinase A, for long-term memory expression. Our results indicate that memory formation and retrieval may share some molecular mechanisms in the hippocampus.

Temporal aspects in Chaka

This study examines temporal relations in Chaka. The novel is selected in an effort to draw some conclusions as to how Mofolo deals with narrative order and duration as viewed by Genette. It is found that though the writer uses anachronies abundantly, these do not violate the chronological order of events. The anachronies merely serve to recall past events and to mention in advance what to be expected in the story. There is no violation of narrative duration.

The Uses of Memory: An Introduction

In his classic essay His Own Historian, Carl Becker declared historians to be keepers of the myths. The idea of history as myth may be Becker's most memorable legacy, but word useful is equally important. For Becker, good history must be history, living history, history that does work in world. Historyboth personal and public-is unstable pattern of remembered things redesigned and newly colored to suit convenience of those who make use of it.11 This notion of contemporary usefulness of history, which Becker formulated so forcefully and well, lies at heart of study of historical memory, an area of history scholarship that has flourished in 1990s. Increasingly, historians seek to understand how people have constructed pasts that were to them in their own present. The subjects and sources for this new history are typically artifacts of public memory: monuments, battlefields, museums, and historic reconstructions; festivals, pageants, and celebrations; Hollywood movies and school textbooks. In other words, historians have been most interested in social or collective memory, often patriotic official history or countervailing unofficial histories mounted against it. But while memories may be constructed in culture and preserved in books, museums, or other public forms, they come alive in minds of individual people. It is instructive to recall that in Carl Becker's parable of history making, Everyman was an individual with an individual's historical problem: He needed to remember whether had paid his coal bill. Mr. Everyman cannot do what needs or desires to do without recalling past events, Becker wrote, and he cannot recall past events without in some subtle fashion relating them to what needs or desires to do.2 In two essays in this round table, Robert E. McGlone and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall refocus study of historical memory on individual. McGlone draws on recent research in cognitive psychology to show how over time John Adams rehearsed and reconstructed his memory of drafting of Declaration of Independence. Hall draws on autobiographical writings of three extraordinary sisters to show how individual and family memory could intersect in unexpected ways with public memory of American South. In each essay, individual is at center stage, and public historythe Declaration of Independence

Remembrance of Things False

M ore than 60 years ago, British psychologist Frederick Bartlett issued what amounted to a consumer alert regarding a common mental product-memory. Remembering events one has witnessed or experienced rests on a process of mental construction that tends to build in errors and outright fabrications, Bartlett asserted in Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1932). In his most famous experiment, Bartlett had college students read a North American Indian folk tale, War of the Ghosts, and then tested their recall of it on several occasions. Individuals mangled the story more with each succeeding attempt to remember it, notably by changing elements of the legend to match their own expectations, altering the form of the story to that of an English fairy tale, and sometimes even adding a moral to it. People use frameworks of knowledge about the world based on prior experience to interpret and remember events, Bartlett theorized. This approach proves more efficient than cramming the brain with one memory after another, each stored in its entirety within a cavernous cerebral library, but it also creates the possibility of remembering things that never happened. Largely neglected for several decades after its publication, Bartlett's book now attracts lots of attention in the world of memory research. Investigations of memory errors and illusions have mushroomed in the past several years. This trend takes its inspiration from both the long-standing study of perceptual and judgmental errors in psychology and the recent bitter debate over the reality of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse (SN: 9/18/93, p. 184). The conflict over lost and found memories of past traumas shows no sign of dissipating: Witness the final report of the American Psychological Association's working group on investigation of memories of childhood abuse, released in February. The group's six members-three clinicians who work with trauma victims and three psychologists who study the suggestibility of memory-agreed on a few general issues, such as the possibility that memories of abuse resurface after a period of forgetting and that psychotherapists or others can influence the construction of bogus memories. The bulk of the 239-page report, however, consists of an impassioned debate between the clinicians and the scientists. The clinicians point to evidence that sexual abuse can result in memory disturbances which interrupt recall but do not introduce false memories. The researchers emphasize studies demonstrating the relative ease with which misleading information and imagined events enter memory. Propelled by several highly publicized lawsuits against psychotherapists for allegedly conjuring up false memories of sexual abuse from their clients, a rising tide of studies examining what the researchers call implanted or illusory memory has deposited a thick layer of doubt atop any presumptions that recall of past events can be trusted. Memory's reputation has been tarnished lately, asserts Daniel L. Schacter, a Harvard University psychologist and author of Searching for (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Memory is by and large pretty accurate, but distortions can arise due to its constructive nature.

Working memory networks and the origin of language areas in the human brain

Temporoparietal-prefrontal working memory networks are proposed as fundamental in the evolutionary origin of the language regions. Having a primordial capacity to name objects or situations, primitive hominids may have strongly benefited from the possibility to recall past events from memory, in order to refer to them through vocal communication. Working memory cortical networks are related to these types of tasks, and are arranged quite similarly to the language networks in the brain. It is possible that the language areas and their connections arose as a local specialization of these large-scale cortical networks, that developed as neural strategies to recall past events to be shared in community. The origin of syntax may have taken place after these networks were sufficiently stabilized, and (at least originally) may have been related to aspects of vocal motor control, involving the progressive differentiation of the anterior language areas and their connections.

Metabolic impairment in human amnesia: a PET study of memory networks.

Human amnesia is a clinical syndrome exhibiting the failure to recall past events and to learn new information. Its "pure" form, characterized by a selective impairment of long-term memory without any disorder of general intelligence or other cognitive functions, has been associated with lesions localized within Papez's circuit and some connected areas. Thus, amnesia could be due to a functional disconnection between components of this or other neural structures involved in long-term learning and retention. To test this hypothesis, we measured regional cerebral metabolism with 2-[18F]fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose ([18F]FDG) and positron emission tomography (PET) in 11 patients with "pure" amnesia. A significant bilateral reduction in metabolism in a number of interconnected cerebral regions (hippocampal formation, thalamus, cingulate gyrus, and frontal basal cortex) was found in the amnesic patients in comparison with normal controls. The metabolic impairment did not correspond to alterations in structural anatomy as assessed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These results are the first in vivo evidence for the role of a functional network as a basis of human memory.

Using Focus Groups to Improve Survey Research

Mass communication researchers often ask questions that require individuals to recall past behaviors and events, but little attention has been given to how interviewers can stimulate recall. This study – applying focus group techniques – indicates survey respondents may have more to say than they initially think.

Learning to Reminisce: A Case Study

Abstract This study examined mother-child conversation about past events as a context in which children acquire the discourse skills for talking about the past and develop the ability to recall past events. Conversations about past events were recorded in one mother-child dyad from 20 to 28 months. Analyses focused on changes in the structure and content of the conversation over time as well as on the effects of retention interval on long-term memory. In addition, effects of repeated memory conversations about the same events were examined. Over time, the child was more active in participating in and then initiating conversa-tions about the past. Her contributions also became more evaluative with age. Repeated memory conversations did not affect the child's recall of the particular events that had been previously discussed, but over the 8 months she was able to recall more about events in general. These results suggest that early autobio-graphical memory development involves learning how to remember, not what to remember; the skills for retrieving and talking about memories emerge, but the specific content of repeatedly recalled events varies over retelling. (Psychology)

Childhood Events Recalled by Children and Adults

Publisher Summary This chapter examines two parallel yet distinctive phenomena of human memory. First, most adults can recall few if any specific events from the early years of life. Second, attempts by preschool children to recall past events on demand-even events of the previous day-frequently are unsuccessful by adult standards. A tantalizing parallelism is evident about the connection, if any, between the paucity of early childhood memories for adults and the limitations of an immature human memory system. The chapter delineates possible connections between early memory development and the difficulties that most adults experience when trying to remember events of their childhood. Two prior questions have to be addressed. First, evidence for the presumed lack of early memories in adults-commonly termed childhood amnesia-has with a few notable exceptions consisted of clinical case studies. Critical new data have been presented in the past few years. So, what is the current scientific status of this concept? Second, systematic studies of preschoolers' memory for naturally occurring events, practically nonexistent 10 or 20 years ago, also have increased sharply in the 1980s. Is a deficiency of memory in early childhood convincingly demonstrated? A review and integration of research on memories of childhood events is timely for two reasons. First, the most compelling evidence has appeared in the last few years and has not yet been synthesized. Second, both adults' and children's recall failures have practical consequences. For adults, reconstruction of early childhood events remains an important component of psychotherapy. For preschool children, the question of whether they can recall specific episodes has become a critical and controversial aspect of legal testimony.

Retrieval and Organizational Strategies in Conceptual Memory: A Computer Model

Abstract : People effortlessly recall past events and episodes in their lives many times in the course of a normal day. A reasonable goal in the design of computer programs is to construct a memory with that same capability. To facilitate human-like retrieval of events from a computer memory, we must first specify a reasonable memory organization. We must then design updating and retrieval processes to build up and access that information. This thesis will present such a theory, and will describe a computer program called CYRUS which implements that theory. CYRUS (Computerized Yale Retrieval and Updating System) stores and retrieves episodes in the lives of Secretaries of State Cyrus Vance and Edmund Muskie. When new events are added to its memory, CYRUS integrates them into memory along with the events it already knows about. CYRUS can then answer questions posed to it in English about the events it stores. The algorithms and memory organization used in CYRUS have been developed by examining the way people answer questions requiring extensive memory search. Its reconstructive processes include instantiation strategies, which construct and elaborate on contexts for search, and search strategies, which direct construction.

Physiological studies of the brain: Implications for science teaching

AbstractPhysiological changes resulting from repeated, long‐term stimulation have been observed in the brains of both humans and laboratory animals. It may be speculated that these changes are related to short‐term and long‐term memory processes. A physiologically based model for memory processing (PBMMP) can serve to explain the interrelations of various areas of the brain as they process new stimuli and recall past events. The model can also serve to explain many current principles of learning theory and serve as a foundation for developing new theories of learning based upon the physiology of the brain.

Contextual memory in the molecular domain.

Contextually rich recall of past events and actions indicates the formation of complex memory traces in which many items of information are integrated. The speed of this process and the inference that large numbers of cortical neurons are involved argue against synaptic transmission of all of the information required. The intercellular electromagnetic field giving rise to the EEG may function as an additional carrier of information essential to contextual processing. Recent experiments have led to models of the neural membrane that show very great sensitivities to the intercellular field. Changes of arrayed molecular conformations in this membrane due to cooperative effects in the intercellular field may provide a contextual memory located within the dense dendritic network of the cortex. Integrative effects within the volume structure of complex electromagnetic fields may thus provide a means of high-speed contextual processing and discrimination.

Time relations in the recall of events of the day

Subjects were asked to recall events that occurred on previous days and to verbalize what they were thinking as they arrived at the answer. It was found that there was a significant tendency for Ss to recall past events by moving from a prior event to the event to be recalled, i.e., recall was from the past to the present. This result was interpreted as indicating the frequent use of forward chaining in the recall of a day’s events.

The importance of emotional experiences in the analytic process

T Rs cr~s.P~AL A ' r T I ~ to the signi~cance of emotional experiencing during the analytic process has changed over the years. At first it was felt that the recall of past events with emotion was the important factor. Later, the focus of emphasis was placed on the understanding of past events subsequent upon their being experienced. The curative effect was considered as being consequent upon the patient's reappraisal of the past through the use of his present mature judgment. A later shift led to the present position that insight accompanied by an emotional experience is beneficial and of more importance than intellectual insight. Today it is widely held that emotional experience is an essential factor in every analysis. The feeIing of strong emotions during analysis does not necessarily have a therapeutic effect. The experiencing of which Homey speaks has a totality and aliveness to it. At the time of experiencing, the entire being of the person is involved. Whatever is being experienced is done so in body, mind and feelings with an intense sense of unity, even when it is conflict that is being experienced. At such a time the person lives his feelings with intensity, clarity, commitment and an unshakable conviction about the truth of his feelings. This totality is attained when certain conditions are present. The first is a wanting to feel, without reservation, whatever is there. I t is a state of unqual;fied openness to experience. The second has to do with degrees of awareness. Significant emotional experiencing occurs under conditions of heightened awareness of feelings and their implications which have hitherto been moreor-less out of awareness. The increased awareness seems to liberate an increased capacity for depth and intensity of feeling, The third condition is one of accepting oneself "as is" without embellishment, intellectualization or condemnatory judgment. The question at such times is "What do I feel?" The questions "Why?" or "Have I the right?" do not occur. Such totality of experiencing has intrinsic values. In the first place nothing is so real as that which is truly felt. A person may have strong convictions about something, but these convictions may be of the nature of intellectual persuasions and may never have been put to the test of actual involvement. Experiencing a conviction with passion and depth of emotion gives it a quality of reality it did not have before. In the course of analysis, that which is held as opinion about oneself is only an inference