Painful Memories Being example essay topic

Discuss the psychological and neurological mechanisms underlying forgetting. Our memory is a system which we use to store information and items which allows us to carry out everyday tasks, such as shopping, and remember episodes of our life such as our 16th birthday party. As such our memory is required to do three things; it is required to take in the information and code it appropriately, store the coded information, and retrieve it at the appropriate time. Given that memory has to complete these three tasks to work effectively it also has the ability to go wrong at each stage resulting in forgetting, that is the process by which memories are lost (Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, 20 XX). This study aims to look at two mechanisms underlying the idea of forgetting, the neurological and the psychological. The neurological aspect looks at physical damage to the brain, or brain stem which results in some form of amnesia, whereas the psychological aspect looks at amnesia as a result of no physical damage.

Much research has been done into the idea of forgetting, as it allows us to gain greater insight as to how the memory works. Crack (19 XX) looked at the serial position effect, which is the idea that the closer to the middle an item is in a list the more likely it is to be forgotten. This can be explained by two effects known as primacy and recency effect. Short-term memory (STM) works on a "first-in-first-out" principle, that is to say once the brain has been presented with 7+- 2 (blah ) items any further presentation will push those items at the beginning out.

The curve that you an plot from this is the serial position curve and it shows us that those items input first generally have enough time to be rehearsed before they are forced out of STM, these items are often well remembered at recall, similarly those items which are presented last, and so are still stored in STM are remembered well. However, those items which are in the middle of the list are often forgotten as they do not have enough time to be rehearsed before they are "pushed" out by final items. This effect firstly backs up the research by Blah ( ) and secondly demonstrates how important rehearsal and consolidation of information in STM is for us to commit events, procedures and ideas permanently to Long-term memory. Peterson and Peterson (1986) wanted to look at STM in respect to other reasons as to why information is not committed to LTM and as a result forgotten. They studied the participant's ability to remember "trigrams", three constants presented together.

The aim was to look at the ability to remember when no rehearsal was allowed. Findings showed that the average percentage of correct recall of trigrams is high with short delays, but recall falls as the delay period increases (Peterson and Peterson as cited in Baddeley (which date?) ). This forgetting was put down to a process known as interference. The participants were asked to perform various interpolating tasks which prevented them from rehearsing the trigrams and a's a result they were unable to remember any of the information. The fact that material in STM is forgotten within a period of 6-12 seconds if it is not rehearsed was interpreted by Peterson and Peterson as evidence of the rate of decay of a short-term memory trace.

A similar experiment by Mcgeoch and McDonald (1931) (cited in Baddeley? ?) used two sets of participants, and both sets were asked to learn and relearn a set of adjectives. One set were allowed to rest and the other set were asked to learn a further set of unrelated material. Forgetting increased in those subjects who were required to take part in further activity involving their STM, showing again this idea of interference. Interference can be looked at in terms of retroactive interference and proactive interference. The forgetting of old information by new information somehow superseding the old is retroactive. This can be seen in terms of whatever strengthens one recall of an association can minimise the recall of a previous association.

(Need an example). Proactive inhibition is the opposite effect whereby the old response comes forward instead of the new. In essence retroactive interference and proactive inhibition display the concept the memories are not separate from each other and have the ability to interact, thus the more similar two episodes are the more likely they are to interact within memory. This interaction can be used to an advantage as it can allow us to learn new information as we can build on the old, indeed amnesic patients can still learn and often remember past memories though this new learning process. However it can lead to memories being so similar that parts of one are easily remembered as parts of another, and as a result recall of this piece of information is incorrect, or has new items added. Amnesia can be divided into two parts functional amnesia and organic amnesia.

Organic amnesia is described as any form of memory loss resulting directly from brain damage, where as functional amnesia is memory loss where there is no physical damage apparent. Memory can be thought of a's a loop which runs from the Hippocampus and mammillary bodies at a sub cortical level, through the temporal lobes and then to the Frontal lobes and vice versa. This loop has the potential too be interrupted at all these points. When a person receives a blow to the head, the brain is subject to a number of physical forces. As the blow is received, the skull accelerates and decelerates rapidly in one direction; with the brain encased in a liquid sac, it lags behind the movement of the skull. The brain catches up with the skull as the skull starts to decelerate, but at this point the brain is still accelerating and hits the skull in the direction of acceleration.

The brain rebounds off the skull, starting a movement in the opposite direction, which can cause it to additionally strike the opposite side of the skull. This usually causes bruising in the areas where the brain makes contact with the skull, and contortion where the fixed brain stem is twisted and strained by the moving brain. It is this bruising and contortion that can lead to the damage in these four areas of the brain and lead to temporary or maybe even permanent memory loss. This loss can come in a number of ways; traumatic amnesia is a confused state that as its name suggests comes after an accident or event resulting in temporary amnesia. Patients are often disorientated and are unable to remember even when told frequently, who they are and why they are there. This amnesia can last from a few minutes to a few months (EXAMPLE).

There are also other amnesia which are a result of a bang to the head, retrograde, and anteograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia, is that whereby individuals can not remember past events, normally anything before the incident. It often results in the patient never being able to recall the moments just before the accident, this links back to our earlier idea of rehearsal. Theories suggest that as the event is emotionally distressing and individual is likely to put them out of their mind, if this were the case however, then why do those who are unconscious during the accident still not regain these memories of exactly what happened. Yarn ell and Lynch (1970) suggest that retrograde amnesia of an event is not due to the fact that the information is never taken in, but due to the fact that the brain never has the time to consolidate and commit to LTM those pieces of information.

So sensory memory and STM may recognise what is happening, however as a memory trace requires time to consolidate, and there is no time for rehearsal, the episode is lost. Ante grade amnesia is the forgetting of post event information. That is they may be able to remember very clearly events from their childhood, and previous experiences up until the accident, but memories beyond that point are lost and they are unable to commit new information and episodes to long term memory, this could be down to a dysfunction in the consolidation process, in that they receive and understand what occurs at the time but are either unable to consolidate, and rehearse or are unable to recode the information appropriately for storage. Further to this concept of emotionally painful memories being pushed out is Freud's idea of Repression.

Repression looks at the retrieval of painful memories being actively avoided. He suggests that incidents associated with pain are more readily forgotten than those associated with pleasure. Similar studies have looked at whether pain is remembered as intensely as it was recorded at time of event. An example measures pain noted at childbirth and then later reportings of pain felt, and intensity of pain remembered indeed begins to decay.

This in itself makes evolutionary sense, as it would not b sound for women to remember the pain of childbirth as they would be unlikely to advocate pregnancy, or indeed get pregnant again themselves. Freud believed that pain, and strong unpleasant emotions would result in these memories being "repressed" that is pushed away. This pushing away can lead to memories being repressed or ignored for many years until a trigger releases it. Loftus would contend this theory believing that repression does not exist but false memories do, and instead of memories being repressed, a stimuli instead cause memories to be confused an thus leaves an individual open for suggestibility. Most attempts to reproduce repression within a laboratory setting have failed; supporting Loftus in her beliefs that repression does not exist. Although the repression process is said to be completely automatic psychological defences against emotional trauma, and does not involve conscious intent so surely a significant amount of pressure would need to be placed upon an individual to recreate repression.

Repression has not be scientifically substantiated however research has been conducted into the feasibility of the process. Waldforgerl as cited by Hunter (1957) asked participants to take a few minutes to reflect on their childhood and write down as many experiences as they could remember. Results showed that from the memories recalled on average 50% were pleasant, 30% unpleasant and 20% neutral. This does not display repression, but it shows that little of what you remember from your childhood, which is often small episodes, is unpleasant, and few bad experiences are remembered later on. This is obviously not sound evidence in support of Freud's theory but may be the way forward in terms of research in this area, instead of trying to recreate the effect. Most of the evidence we do have to support the idea of repression comes from those patients with serious neurosis, or severe emotional symptoms, such as hysterical amnesia or Fugue.

Cases of individuals who have been found wandering around confused and with no recollection of who they are and what they are doing there are not uncommon. This is a sense similar to a nervous breakdown, and usually result from traumatic experience or emotional crisis. Individuals seem to shut down and cease to be themselves, this is known as Fugue. These individual can often not remember any traumatic events that may have lead to this sate of mind and in the case of fugue, are often completely unaware that these bouts of amnesia accompanied by illusions and disorientation occur.