Non-Declarative Memory

The book "The Assault" by Harry Mulisch is very centered around the main character Anton's struggle with memory. The relationship between his approach to memory and the effects of his approach proved to be the main conflict of the story. Being complicated, it is hard to decipher. During the beginning of the novel (post-tragedy) Anton is very much a shell of his memories. Many details of his character, from major life aspects such as his wife or his job, too small (seemingly) insignificant things such as what sorts of media he likes can all be traced back to his supposedly forgotten memories of the events surrounding his families tragedy.

2. Mastin, Luke. "The Human Memory - What It Is, How It Works and How It Can Go Wrong." The Human Memory - What It Is, How It Works and How It Can Go Wrong. The Human Memory.net, 2010. Web. 04 October 2015.

Anyone reading Joshua Foer’s “The End of Remembering” can assume that he knows a lot about the brain and how it works. After all he graduated from Yale in 2004, and later went on to become the 2006 United States Memory Champion. With Foer’s interest in mental athletes he decided to do a journalism project to study them. This project would end up being the result of his book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything from which “The End of Remembering” is one of the chapters. In this chapter Foer’s lays a solid foundation of the development of writing. He also includes historical views of remembering and how we learned in terms of our memory. Foer not only gives historical views but supports his claims with science

Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory is a hallmark of the surrealist movement. Dali famously described his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs” and The Persistence of Memory is a prime example of that description. The Persistence of Memory depicts striking and confusing images of melting pocket watches and a mysterious fetus-like structure all sprawled over the dreamscape representation of Dali’s home of Port Lligat, Spain. Dali uses strange images, color, and shadows in The Persistence of Memory to convey an abstract view on dreams, time, and reality.

For this homework assignment you will need to watch the documentary, The Memory Loss Tapes and respond to the questions below. The link can be found in the homework block on WAMAP.

Memories are crucial to everything we do every day. Without memories we would not know who is important to us or what we enjoy doing. We use our memories continuously, even when we do not realize that we are. In her memoir Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan loses much of her episodic memory from the time period in which she battled Anti-NDMA-receptor encephalitis. Because of this, she loses a portion of her identity, and struggles for a period of time while attempting to find herself again.

One of the most interesting aspects of the human brain is the ability to remember and to travel back in time within your memory. The documentary, How Does Your Memory Work?, looks into the complexity of memory over a lifetime, something most of us take for granted it says. We learn that memory develops early, but as time progresses, some parts of memory can disappear. We also find out that our memory shapes who we are, including our personalities. Included in this video are interviews of a young guy who was born prematurely with memory not fully developed and a young girl who was a victim of sexual assault with a traumatic memory of her attack.

This article explains the importance of getting the perfect amount of sleep at night. The idea that sleeping for less than five hours or more than nine hours proves to have a negative effect on the human body. Sleep deprivation has a closely related link to memory retention and can cause a person to have trouble with daily task. The author continues to explain that not only is the brain effected by too little or too much sleep, but the rest of the body is also effected. Conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and even depression have links to not getting the perfect amount of sleep. The article concludes with listing tips to get the ideal amount of sleep at night, such as, going to sleep and waking up at the same time every day and limiting the amount of caffeine that is consumed throughout the day.

The Impossible Knife of Memory, by Laurie Halse Anderson is about a father-daughter duo who were trying to live a normal life so Hayley Kincain, the daughter, could finish her last year of highschool. Hayley’s father, Andy Kincain, was a veteran soldier who suffers PTSD from his active-duty days, and now currently is an alcoholic who has difficulty holding onto a steady job. Hayley constantly worries about her dad, as she inspects his truck’s mileage daily to see if he has gone to work, and skipping school to check up on him when she heard that Andy’s ex-girlfriend, Trish, has been contacting the school. Somehow, past all the panic and worry, Hayley manages to develop a close and stable friendship with her neighbor, Gracie Rappaport, who

Many human development specialists have examined memory loss of adults later in life. During the past fifty years, there have been many studies in children’s cognitive development and earlier childhood memory loss. Ernest G. Schachtel conducted studies on why people forget childhood memories as they grow older. He described the processes that could be involved in early memory loss (Crain, 2005). He was influenced by Sigmund Freud’s cognitive theory (Crain, 2005). Lev S. Vygotsky, however, described children’s early memory development as a holistic process that involved society, physiological, cultural, and economical environments. (Vygotsky,

In “Two Amazing Tales of Memory” Mr.S`s memory affected his life by one being tested every day by researchers trying to prove him wrong everyday. Also, it affected his life at home by being able to memorize phone numbers, birth dates, address`s of people. Lastly it affected his life in court to because he could imagine in his head everything that was going to play out. One way his memory affected his life was being tested every day by people struggled to find out that he can actually do this as I said in Paragraph one. I know that he was tested everyday because it says in paragraph three of the text says, “Every day he and other reporters met with their editor to hear their assignments.”

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us

There are parts of this movie that are not accurate depictions of amnesia. For instance, in the film Barrymore’s characters’ father gives the fallacy that time is standing still. Every day they pretend that it’s October 13, 2002, instead of helping her with her condition. The majority of patients who suffer from amnesia don’t have a support system that can give this much time completely to the patient.

Central idea: Memory is a process of the brain which is prone to certain failures, although specific steps can be taken to guard against these failures.

Case 1 tells the story of Henry Molaison (HM), a man with no memory. He lost his memory due to the operation of suctioned out the hippocampus to treat his epileptic seizures. At that time, it was not known yet that the hippocampus was essential for making memories. After operation, his seizures were significantly reduced, but Henry suffered a global amnesia. Owen et al. (2007) describes patients with global amnesia as perceptive and attentive but with a total loss of short-term memory and some trouble accessing memories of the recent past. Henry could not learn new things as he quickly forgot everything that he had learned. He could learn at a subconscious level only.