* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Download memory and its learning implications
Limbic system wikipedia , lookup
Brain Rules wikipedia , lookup
Source amnesia wikipedia , lookup
Memory consolidation wikipedia , lookup
Socioeconomic status and memory wikipedia , lookup
Traumatic memories wikipedia , lookup
De novo protein synthesis theory of memory formation wikipedia , lookup
Misattribution of memory wikipedia , lookup
Emotion and memory wikipedia , lookup
Sparse distributed memory wikipedia , lookup
Memory and aging wikipedia , lookup
Epigenetics in learning and memory wikipedia , lookup
Eyewitness memory (child testimony) wikipedia , lookup
Childhood memory wikipedia , lookup
Exceptional memory wikipedia , lookup
Atkinson–Shiffrin memory model wikipedia , lookup
Prenatal memory wikipedia , lookup
Music-related memory wikipedia , lookup
Catalina Norato MEMORY AND ITS LEARNING IMPLICATIONS Memory and its Learning Implications Asociación Educar Presented by: Catalina Norato Tutor: Denise Toiw Country: Bogotá, Colombia Living things exist in a world where conditions, behaviors, relations and many more actions have to be learned in order to survive. If we come back to the prehistoric years, we could understand how primitive species defended their territory, food and closest members as a natural and instinctive behavior. These survival actions were at some point, genetically transferred to the next generations, but they were also learned by imitation. All that knowledge has been stored in the human and animal’s mind and has been modified along the years. Memory is one of the best tools we have to learn something new. However, it has been quite complex to understand how it works, where in the brain it is located and how we can take advantage of it in different situations. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the functioning of the memory in our brain and how this affects living things’ behaviors and learning process. Different studies will be described in order to support the previous statement. First of all, it is necessary to give a good definition of what memory is. It is defined as a group of neurons that get together in order to form a hebbian engrams. According to the type of information we learn, a certain neurons join. That is why, we have thousands of hebbian engrams, each one storing a specific knowledge. Types of Memory Considering the fact that the input information we get comes from different sources, it also enters to our brain in a different way and therefore, it is stored differently. Therefore, it is relevant to study how memory is classified and how sensory inputs are analyzed in our whole body. Image 1.0 shows the different types of memories and gives a short description of each one of them. Catalina Norato MEMORY AND ITS LEARNING IMPLICATIONS Image 1.0 MEMORY Long-term Memory Short term- Memory Declarative (explicit) WHAT-information Semantic Facts and information acquired through learning. We can declare or state what we know to others. Non-declarative (implicit) HOW - Skill Perceptions or motor procedures. It is shown to others by performance. Episodic Abilities Generalized: Knowing something without remembering when or where it was learned. Autobiographical (Emotions: We remember an event in a particular time and place. Riding a bike. These actions need motor coordination. Conditioning Salivating when you see a chocolate cake. Relating a stimulus with a specific reaction Priming Exposure to a stimulus facilitates subsequent responses to the same or similar stimulus NLP exercises Associating the yellow color with a banana Catalina Norato MEMORY AND ITS LEARNING IMPLICATIONS Short term- Memory MEMORY Working Memory It helps us perform actions and do mental operations. It also helps us to create consciousness. Visual This memory gets the information from images. Iconic Sensitive (Perception) Echoic Additive The person received sensory information and he retains it to understand what someone else says. General Information Input Model The incoming information that we get from the environment enters to our body through different senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch). Once it is inside, the brain encodes it; this means that more or less neural engrams are formed. At the same time, these neural engrams define if the new knowledge will stay in the short-term memory or in the long-term memory. In image it is shown how after the information is encoded, goes to the short-term storage. If it is relevant to us, our brain will consolidate and pass it to the long-term memory; but if it is not we will get rid of it. On the other hand, the information that gets to pass to the long-term memory, stays temporarily in the working memory as well as some of the inputs that are not thrown away from the short-term memory. The information that gets to this point is used by people in their daily life. Finally, the retrieval process happens when we actually perform any action and we get to use the information stored in our brains. Image 1.1 Catalina Norato MEMORY AND ITS LEARNING IMPLICATIONS Memory Disorders First of all, it is important to understand the difference between anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia. Anterograde amnesia is defined as an inability to form new memories following brain damage. Retrograde amnesia occurs when patients lose the ability to retrieve memories of events prior to brain damage. One of the most studied patients in history was H.M. who lose his memory after a surgery. Patient H.M H.M. suffered from epilepsy and when he was 20 years old, he had a surgery in which doctors took out part of his hippocampus. It is important to remember that the hippocampus helps people create memories and retain them. This patient lesion didn’t allow H.M. to form new memories (anterograde memory). However, this implicit/working memory was not altered. Image 1.2 (a) shows how H.M. was able to trace a star by looking at its reflection in the mirror. In part B we can see how H.M.’s performance improved when he repeater the action over and over again (priming). However, he didn’t remember he had done it. Image 1.2 Super Memories Image 1.3 Jill Price wrote a book called “The Woman who can’t forget”. She can remember what happened in every day of the year. Alexander Luria (in the picture), wrote the book “The mind of a Mnemodist: A little book about a vast memory”. In this book he described the story of Solomon Sheresshevskii who also had a perfect Catalina Norato MEMORY AND ITS LEARNING IMPLICATIONS memory. In the other hand, George Finn has an IQ lower than a 100 but he has an excellent mental calendar. He can also remember the day he met a person, what he was wearing and how the weather was like. He can also recognize people because of their odor. Kim Peek learned all the zip codes of the United States and he could tell a complete book after reading it. Brad Williams suffered from the syndrome hyperthymesia and he can remember every day of his life. Finally, Rick Baron had a perfect autobiographical memory, he could say the exact day of someone’s death. Memory and Neurology Talking about the long term memory, the hippocampus (image 1.4) allows to encode and to recover memories. At the same time it also has neural connections with the cerebral cortex (one of the areas where long-term memory is stored). Each pattern of neurons form a memory in our brain (image 1.5). Image 1.4 Image 1.5 Image 1.6 In a research done in order to analyze the semantic and episodic memory, a group of people was asked to listen to personal stories (episodic memory). In image 1.6 (a) “My Story”, it is shown how this type of story activated the right temporal lobe and the frontal cortex (association cortex). While Catalina Norato MEMORY AND ITS LEARNING IMPLICATIONS people from the other group was asked to listen to stories of other people (semantic condition). In image 1.6 (b) “Your Story”, it is shown how the stories just activated the temporal lobe. Image 1.7 Molecules Researchers Todd Sacktor and Yadin Dudai (2011), investigated a molecule that can maintenance the long-term memory. They conditioned rats to associate a taste with a sick feeling. The rats encoded the memory in their brains. In order to change the rat’s memories, the researchers trained the rats to associate certain foods with bellyaches, they they injected a nonillness-inducing virus called PKMzeta (Image 1.7, in red). The increase of this enzyme in the rats, enhanced their ability to remember, and in the contrary, the mutant form would block the memory. Image 1.7 Talking about the short-term memory, lesions in the prefrontal cortex (image 1.7) alter how the working memory works. Piaget described that little children don’t have the working memory very well developed, so if an adult hides them an object and the child sees where he put it, but a few seconds later the child looks in a different direction, he would forget where the object is. That is the reason why little children show less prefrontal cortex activation. Image 1.8 Regarding structural changes, there isn’t any change when we store new information in the short-term memory but there are important ones in the long-term memory. As we can see in image 1.8, when new memories are stored for a long period of time, the neurons produce new receptors and new dendrites. In the other hand, the short-term memory just involves neurotransmitters but not a structural change in the neuron. Catalina Norato MEMORY AND ITS LEARNING IMPLICATIONS Conditioning Image 1.9 One of the most important researchers about memory and conditioning is Ivan Pavlov (see image 1.9). In his conditioning reflex research, he attached tubes to dog’s saliva glands to see the amount of saliva that was produced. First he made a bell sound with no response then, he showed the same bell and food, obtaining saliva (conditioning). Finally, when the dog heard the bell, it would immediately produce saliva. Conditioning it’s a type of memory that the more it is repeated, the stronger the neural connections get and the more we get used to the response. Long-term Potentiation (LTP): Long-term potentiation occurs when connections between two neurons become stronger. Certain neurotransmitters are released from one neuron to the other and this determines how strong the connections can be. Therefore, this can be one way of learning, the stronger the connections, the longer the knowledge will be stored. Image 1.10 shows how in an initial state the dendrites are releasing certain amount of neurotransmitters and due to repeated stimulation for a certain period of time, there is more release of neurotransmitters which causes the Hebbian engram to be stronger. Image 1.10 Catalina Norato MEMORY AND ITS LEARNING IMPLICATIONS Cortical Areas and Memory The occipital lobe is in charge of visual processing. People remember things and events because they stored an image in their brain about the specific situation. When we think about what we learned, we can see the image in our head and our visual cortex activates (visual memory). Talking about the parietal lobe, its main functions are somatosensory perception and attention. Somatosensory perception has to do with our five senses. The parietal lobe receives the inputs from the senses and some of this inputs become knowledge for us. The temporal lobe areas more involved in memory are adjacent to the hippocampus and they are called “medial temporal cortex”. These areas are in charge of encoding new information but not in storing it. Damage to the medial temporal lobe causes amnesia. The frontal lobes cover functions such as initiating memory (starting the conscious process of remembering). They also are in charge of source monitoring, that is determining from which source a certain input/memory comes. “Source monitoring means being able to distinguish if a memory is a personally experienced event or something someone told us.” It also includes the difference between fact and imagination. Conclusion In summary, we can say that memory plays such a big role in our daily lives. Everything that happens to us is stored in our brain, either for a short period of time or for a long one. Even though, this paper just shows a brief overview of the topic, we are able to understand how different the information that we get is and how it is analyzed and encoded. We are also conscious of how environmental, sensitive and many more factors determines if the new input will be used just for a moment or not. In the other hand, the new findings tell us that there is a prominent future to learn more about the memory and how some of its deficits could be managed by means of new drugs or molecules. In the same way, research can reveal new ways of learning and of making the new knowledge stronger which at the same time may cause a big change in the methodology that teachers use in class and how they approach their students and present the information. Catalina Norato MEMORY AND ITS LEARNING IMPLICATIONS References Alonso, S. (2010). Memoria y Aprendizaje. Aprendizaje, Memoria, Plasticidad Nerviosa XI, clase 1,2, 3,4 segundo año. Asociación Educar. Neurosicoeducación Online Brain and Memory. Taken from: http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/35762_Chapter2.pdf Kandel, E., Schwartz, J., Jessell, T., (2000). Principles of Neural Science. Long-Term Potentiation. Taken from: http://www.expertsmind.com Pavlov’s Classic Conditioning. Taken from: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/meriw007/psy_1001/2011/10/pavlovs-conditioned-reflex.php Welsh, J., (2011), A New Molecule for Memory: It Can Enhance or Erase. Taken from: http://www.livescience.com/