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Richard F. Thompson And The Study Of Memory Essay

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Richard F. Thompson and the Study of Memory
Richard F. Thompson was a memory scientist who conducted research on where and how memory is stored and transformed in the brain. He conducted research on the cerebellum, which is a lower brain structure that deals with physical movement, to see how reactions are created and reestablished every time a certain thing happens, which is basically a reflex (Hockenbury, Nolan, & Hockenbury, 2016). His research was to study how a basic function reflex occurs, and how the memory knows to react when something occurs again in the same manner. Thompson succeeded in his research, by conducting an experiment with rabbits and their blinking reflexes (Hockenbury, et al., 2016). He designed a way where rabbits would react to a tone in where they would blink to it (Hockenbury, et al., 2016). He then took an extra step away from the brain, and the rabbits would still react in the same way to the tone, which lead him to discover that the main memory function is stored in the cerebellum (Hockenbury, et al., 2016).
Richard F. Thompson was a very respectable and highly knowledgeable neuroscientist. His work lead to great successes and great feats were demolished with his findings. Thompson, as described in the article Remembering Richard F. Thompson by Joseph E. Steinmetz (2015), was the first neuroscientist in his field of study to have identified and configured the neural circuits that are responsible for classical conditioning in the brain

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