Term Paper on "Human Brain and Memory"

Term Paper 10 pages (3687 words) Sources: 10 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Human Brain and Memory

Of the many intriguing mysteries of the human body, our capacity for memory and loss of memory is one of the most intriguing areas of study. Magda B. Arnold (1984) says that memory is the integration and articulation of the individual objects and experiences up to and including the present moment in our lives (p. 4). It is a mediated experience she contends, taking place in the brain's cortex (p. 4). Without memory, says Daniel L. Schacter (1996), everyone and everything in our daily lives would be strange and unknown; our relatives, our friends, our most common tools of daily use would all be foreign to us, new with each waking day and re-experience of the day (p. 2). Schacter points that out that except for the moments when our memory briefly fails us, or given to disease, our entire lives revolve our memory and we go about our day-to-day activities seldom thinking about where the organization out of chaos in our lives actually comes from. This brief study will explore memory, its capacity, its limits, and its susceptibility to disease and loss.

The Brain and Memory

While our memory serves us well, it has a tendency to be protective of us. It does this by throwing out the little bits of useless information that might otherwise become burdensome; and it stores in a remote region of the brain those experience or things that we do not want to deal with, cannot find the strength in ourselves to deal with at a particular point in time. Albert Einstein was always receiving questions by fans and others as to his great capacity for thinking and memory. He is credited with having responded to one question about how he maintained his brain's incredible capacity for problem solving by saying that he retained only the information that was useful and necessary, and discarded that information which was not useful or necessary. Perhaps Albert Einstein never said that at all, but it certainly gives rise to an interesting question: How does the process of retaining and discarding information work? Schacter says that the answer to questions about memory and memory processing begins with understanding what memory is (p. 4).

A different types of memory that enable us to hold information for brief periods of time, to learn skills and acquire habits, to recognize everyday objects, to retain conceptual information, and to recollect specific events. Acting in concert, these memory systems allow us to accomplish the tasks of our day-to-day lives while also supplying our intellect and emotions with ideas and feelings from the past that allow us to act with purpose and live rich emotional lives. But memory involves more than just our remembrance of things past. As we have come to learn that memory is not one single thing, we've opened up a whole new world of implicit, nonconscious memory that underlies our abilities to carry out effortlessly such tasks as riding a bicycle or playing a piano, without having to direct each movement consciously every time we attempt the task. Many of us think of this type of memory as being stored in our fingers, but new research is uncovering that specific brain systems are involved in the nonconscious effects of the past on the present.

We now know enough about how memories are stored and retrieved to demolish another long-standing myth: that memories are passive or literal recordings of reality. Many of us still see our memories as a series of family pictures stored in the photo album of our minds. Yet it is now clear that we do not store judgment-free snapshots of our past experiences but rather hold on to the meaning, sense, and emotions these experiences provided us. Although serious errors and distortions occur relatively infrequently, they furnish significant clues about how we remember the past because they arise from, and provide a window on, some of the fundamental properties of our memory systems (p. 5)."

There is a relationship in our memory to the present and events of the past, and they are in a sense inseparable (p. 5). Edmon T. Rolls (2000) discusses the stimuli that our brain responds to in triggering memories (p. 599). Rolls says:

Brain systems involved in rewards and punishers are important not only because they are involved in emotion and motivation, but also because they are important in understanding many aspects of brain design, including what signals should be decoded by sensory systems, how learning about the stimuli that are associated with rewards and punishers occurs, and how action systems in the brain must be built (Rolls 1999a) (Rolls, 2000, p. 599)."

Rewards and punishers, which Rolls says can be called emotions, and the understanding of how they might be classified as rewards or punishers is defined by that for which we would and will work for, and that which we would avoid or work to escape (p. 599). Those things that we choose to avoid are usually associated with frustration, anger, pain, fear, and alienation (p. 599).

Whether or not the memory associated with the event, object, person, or other relationship as to how it is stored in our memories would be related to whether or not the stimuli that triggers the memory is a reward or a punisher. Rewards, of course, are associated with pleasure, happiness, excitement, desire, and those emotions that we enjoy experiencing (p. 599). However, there are emotions that serve as warnings to us, too, that are associated with fear, pain and the punishers that we need to have to and we need to be stimulated to recall. For instance, most children learn very early in life that fire burns, causes pain and is, therefore, to be avoided. We avoid the punishment of pain by recalling the physical pain associated with fire. Conversely, certain foods serve as a trigger for us to recall a good and pleasant experience, like a birthday cake.

Rolls describes the punisher and awards mechanisms this way:

When an environmental stimulus has been decoded as a primary reward or punishment, or (after previous stimulus-reinforcer association learning) as a secondary rewarding or punishing stimulus, then it becomes a goal for action. The animal can then perform any action (instrumental response) to obtain the reward, or to avoid the punisher. Thus, there is flexibility of action, and this is in contrast with stimulus-response, or habit, learning, in which a particular response to a particular stimulus is learned. The emotional route to action is flexible not only because any action can be performed to obtain the reward or avoid the punishment, but also because the animal can learn in as little as one trial that a reward or punishment is associated with a particular stimulus by stimulus-reinforcer association learning. Animals must be built during evolution to be motivated to obtain certain rewards and avoid certain punishers. Indeed, primary, or unlearned, rewards and punishers are specified by genes that effectively specify the goals for action. Rolls (1999a) proposes that this is the solution that natural selection has found for how genes can influence behavior to promote their fitness (as measured by reproductive success), and for how the brain could flexibly interface sensory systems with action systems (2000, p. 599)."

Rolls helps us understand a little bit about the emotional/memory connection, but it is here that it begins getting a little more physical and a little more complex. It probably helps to have a visual of the portion of the brain where memory takes place, the hippocampus. (the University of Wisconsin, found online at http://whyfiles.org/184make_memory/2.html,2008).

The brain is a place of immense activity and electrical impulses being transmitted, transported and firing. All of these functions serve the overall mind process in various ways of cause and effect. The hippocampus is the area of the brain where the visuals that we recognize are connected with the memory sources that transmit to our cognitive processes the understanding of what we are seeing (McNamara, Patrick, 1999, p. 72). Patrick McNamara (1999) describes the relationship between the functions of recognition and memory taking place in the hippocampus. He says:

medial archicortical trend originating in the hippocampus and the proisocortex of the medial wall of the frontal lobe gives rise to the anterior cingulate cortex and to supplementary motor cortex and inferior frontal sulcus. The lateral trend begins in the olfactory cortex, peripaleocortical proisocortex of the insula, and proceeds superiorly up the lateral convexity, the superior temporal lobe and inferior parietal sites and thence to somatosensory area II. Again, the trend in each case is for greater differentiation of cellular layers as the trend proceeds toward its "termination" sites. The two trends interact in dosolateral prefrontal cortex. Goldberg (1987) argues that the lateral trend is overepresented in posterior portions of the brain, especially the parietal cortex, and thus the parietal and frontal lobes operate in a kind of mutual inhibitory balance. The great superior longitudinal fasiculus connects frontal and parietal sites, allowing for nuanced interactions between anterior frontal… READ MORE

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