Searching For The Memory

Submitted By MikeChang2014
Words: 727
Pages: 3

Searching for the Memory “Searching for the Memory” begins with a surrealist painter, named Salvador Dali, who quotes, “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same for jewels: it is always false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.” The stamen leads the meaning of our memory Misinformation Effect, which is the tendency to incorporate misleading information into our memory of an event. What we see from what we say leaves a really big gap between reality and fiction, and that is why our memories are unreliable. Psychologist Karl Lashley of Harvard University trained rats to run through mazes to find food. Lashley made lesions on the subjects’ cerebral cortex, figuring out that destroyed cortex impairs memory and may also substitute for any learning. If you were to lose the hippocampus structure on both sides of your brain, you will no longer be able to make any new explicit memories, whereas the damaged visual cortex cam leave one blind without any effect on memory. Fear-conditioned has been tested on rats, where the rat is placed inside a dark environment for their first time with shocks occurring underneath their paws. The second time, they are placed inside the same environment, and the rats instinct reaction is to freeze due to the anxiety of a shock coming around any second. Afterwards, the rats are placed in a bright environment that smells different, and they will show less fearful freezing. Similar experiments have been studied my two teams of researchers, one at the Massachusetts of Technology and one under the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Both teams used mice, but the M.I.T. used blue lights and the Scripps group used delivery of drug not naturally present in animals. The M.I.T. group specifically believed that the engram is found in the Dentate Gyrus that causes fear in any scary events, so they put mice in environment A with different lighting and smell, and then placed the same mice in environment B with blue lights, different smell, and sent out shocks. Lastly, the group placed the mice back inside environment A, but turned on the blue light triggering the mice to freeze and believe that something bad was going to happen even though they were never harmed in environment A. This entire experiment proves that numerous neurons in one region of the brain are for specific memory, but it is unknown for whether the neurons are necessary for memory or deleting these interlaced neurons would cause any impairment. The fact that experiments on the rats and mice have caused a long term fearfulness into their memories; it is considered a Flashbulb Memory. Flashbulb Memories are clear memories of emotionally significant moment or events. These events will replay, whether it