Assignment II
Cog. Psych MWF 1-1:50

October 23, 2013

Source Example:
“Still Charting Memory’s Depths- A conversation with Brenda Miller”
Nytimes.com
Author: Claudia Dreifus
Published: May 20, 2013

I chose an article named “Still Charting Memory’s Depths”. The article centers around neuropsychologist Brenda Miller, who had an important connection with the famous H.M. who we recently covered in class. H.M. is a famous man who had gotten into a bicycle accident, and from that accident, he had developed serious epilepsey that affected his life in a non favorable way. It affected everything he did and he could not keep a job or do a lot of normal life activies other people could do without risk of seizures. He decided to undergo corrective surgery that was meant to help his seizures and improve his quality of life. Unfortunately, removing certain parts of the brain caused H.M. to get anterograde amnesia, he lost his short-term memory, or in other words, his ability to convert short term memories into long term memories. Many scientists study his brain today, because he ended up donating it to scientists. There was one scientist in particular that had a strong connection with him, that was Brenda Miller. Brenda Miller began work on HM by helping De. Penfield detect the epileptic seizures. She was brought in to study HM’s case after the surgery happened and the results were processed. There were two other cases she knew of where patients had the surgery and their memory was also altered in a negative way. Brenda described HM as pleasant, funny and wanting to be of help always. She perfomed tests on HM to see what memories were having trouble surfacing. For example, she would have HM repeat numbers (5,8,4..). HM could recall them right away, even make formulas and such, but once Brenda chose to distract him (…which life does constantly), he had no idea what the numbers were and could not recall them. The main tests she did on HM were motor tasks for learning, which he was surprisingly still able to do. That was her first discovery. Some experiments involved drawing a star while viewing that image in a mirror, it wasn’t perfect and difficult at first, but after many trials (which he did not remember), each day, he began to perform it near perfect. The conclusion of the results as Miller put them was that there are different kinds of memory; long-term, short-term, autobiographic etc. all in which is not whole memory, or determination of memory as one. Memory depends on many