European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - September 24, 1991, Darmstadt, Hesse To your health Why do we remember the name of our third Grade teacher but not what we had for breakfast by Beverly Beyette los Angeles times so you can quote verbatim from a Guy de Maupassant work that you studied in Junior High but you just dialled a phone number and can t remember whose All it Means is that you re quite Normal Lor memory is selective. Quot we Are amazing As storage devices a says Robert a. Bjork a University of California los Angeles psychology professor and expert on memory. Quot there s apparently almost no limit to what we can store in memory. But at any one time we can have highly selective Access in the sense of being Able to recall. Quot what s accessible to us is very dependent on our mood state our physical state our environmental surroundings interpersonal for example Quot if you re at a High school reunion or walking around the town in which you grew up. There will be almost a Rush of memories causing you to recall events and names you might not have thought about in memory Bjork says is not a Container that fills up rather it s Quot some sort of scaffolding Structure Quot a the More it s built up the More places there Are to put things. A you remember statistics of big games. They done to mean much now but they be kind of stuck in there. I remember pretty Well the plays from a game in 1981 when i scored 29 Points for the Houston rockets against the Boston celtics. I have trouble remembering birthdays and a los Angeles lakers coach Mike Dunleavy Quot the memory machine is selective about what gets in and selective about How it changes Over time Quot says Elizabeth Loftus professor of psychology at the University of Washington and author of several books on memory. Quot you just remember the happier times in your life and forget about the sad times Quot says Loftus. People remember their vacations As being happier than they actually were. They forget that it rained and the car ran out of Gas. You remember things in selective ways so your memory conforms to How you wish the past was. None of this indicates any mental aberration she says in fact Quot depressed people tend to dwell on the bad stuff sometimes their memories can be in some ways a Little More she refers to memory As having a Quot superiority. Complex. You remember that you gave More to Charity or your kids walked and talked at an earlier age than they actually did. You conveniently forgot things that maybe wore embarrassing to you Quot this is different from lying she says in that false memories Are actually created Over time and that people Mccall embellished or distorted events with great conviction a Quot it s their what has happened to the original accurate memory7 Loftus believes it May actually be destroyed Quot Well show people an Accident whore a car goes through a red Light and then ask leading and suggestive questions until we get people to say it was a Green Light she says. Later even under hypnosis Quot that red Light can t be in a new Book witness for the defense she explores Quot How memory fails in criminal situations leading to conviction of the wrong person and other tragedies in the criminal Justice life a accumulation of memories is warped through the retelling process too Bjork says Quot it May be that we end up not remembering this thing that happened when we were 12 in some literal Way we remember Only what we recall about Quot i memorized All the presidents of the United states in chronological order just to keep my brain Sharp. I can still recite them. I Learned All the states and their capitals too and can do those. What do i tend to forget the names of people i done to really care a Abigail Van Buren Mark Rosenzweig a University of California Berkeley psychologist with a longtime interest in the brain mechanisms of memory says Quot the things that Are important or have consequences for us tend to be remembered. However we re awfully Good in general at remembering even the but he Points out there is a big difference Between Quot what s stored in memory and what s available at any Given moment for retrieval. We May not get Access to it at the time we Access he says is determined partly by Quot the extent to which one is in the same situation As when one first Learned or first acquired the information. If you want to be Able to do a performance that depends on memory the More you re Able to practice in the situation in which you re expected to perform the better off you la be. 7 remember a fight about Money that my aunt had with my father in the Kitchen when i was a boy. Its a searing emotional memory for me coming from a repressed Irish Catholic new England background. When i run into financial problems like my father did Bam there it is. But in a very forgetful. I can reconstruct the history of evolution but i can t remember whether i be put the sugar in my wife a a Timothy Leary people remember frivolous useless bits of information both because an event initially had an Impact on them and because each time that memory is retrieved it becomes More retrievable in the future Bjork says. Conversely a person May not be Able to recall something like a social Security number because there is no necessity to retrieve it irom memory a Quot we have it on a card with whether you remember what you Learned in College depends he says on Quot How it matches your As they say the Liberal arts Are Quot what you have left when you be forgotten when people express to him concern that they Are losing their memory Bjork has a Quot Good news bad news Quot response you Haven t forgotten. You simply can to recall. He asks rhetorically Quot does that mean everything you get exposed to you remember forever7 no you need to do what s necessary initially to get tins stored or integrated in Long term a a what s the most useless piece of information i be Ever carried around show tunes. I know every word to every one that a Ever been written. What do i have trouble remembering everything. Names. And my own Cole of California swimsuit line after its done. I be looked at it for six months then we show it then i done to remember what was in a designer Anne Cote Quot Given the storage characteristics of the memory system we do not really want everything that exists in our memory to be retrievable. How slow and confusing the process would be Quot says Bjork. With age people show relatively Little loss in semantic memory knowledge baser in procedural memory which is How to do something. Episodic memory is a different matter and it is what determines whether you remember the name of someone you just met or whether you have told a particular Story to a particular person. One does tend to forget names As one gets older he adds but Quot even if your memory performance stayed the same you d make somewhat More errors because you do nothing but accumulate names Over your lifetime. Creating challenges having hobbies engaging regularly in meaningful conversation can All Quot make a b g difference Quot in memory retention says Bjork Quot ii you sit around and reminisce about those few key events in your life a when you were courting the big game in High school or when you fought the War that a my head is filled with silly things. I try hard As i grow older to discard them but they re built in. I remember a phone number from when i was living in Connecticut Back in 1958.1 remember addresses that i lived at. There Are millions of things i Don t remember but when something triggers them there they a Artie Shaw j memory plays tricks. People who get paid to help ethers increase their memory Power offer such suggestions As kicking the drawer closed after you put your car keys inside and conjuring up bizarre images to names. That s or. Crane picture him with a Crane atop his head. However except in cases of senility or disease Loftus others who Chart memory agree there does not have 1 i j a dramatic drop after age 65. Studies show some r a but Loftus asks Quot Are they not absorbing mation As Well or done to they As Well a a is and Bjork dismiss the theory that people Are eng memory lapses simply because of information Quot and in the 90s. An interested Active person they a a Quot i retain Good memory Power. A get or lose it Quot Loftus advises new ideas on How the brain thinks by Sandra Blakeslee new York times c Christopher 29, cannot draw simple figures add two and two or tie his shoes. Yet he Speaks 16 languages half of them fluently. Adam 28, is a stroke patient. He can name Man made objects like saws screwdrivers and shovels but the stroke has left him unable to name most animate objects. The curious result is that ducks foxes camels and zebras Are indistinguishable to him. Carla 22, grew up speaking both her native italian and English. When she began training to become a simultaneous translator her language ability was localized on the left Side of her brain. But after the training English shifted to her right brain while italian remained on the left. Study of special individuals like these together with sophisticated new instruments like pet scanners have afforded a startling new insight into How the brain is organized to handle language. Neur physiologists Are beginning to suspect that there is not a single Center for language but rather that the brain distributes language processing Over some or Many areas. The finding has prompted new ideas about How the brain thinks including a provocative theory that proposes the brain has Quot language convergence zones in which it brings together the separately located attributes of a word or concept. A the time is Ripe for an attack on the neural basis of consciousness Quot and language says or. Francis Crick the famous molecular biologist turned neuroscientist. Attempts to infer the nature of language through psychological experiments will never suffice says Crick who works at the Salk Institute in la Jolla Calif the problem can Only be solved by explanations at the neural level. Among the most interesting new findings about the brain and language Are the following a language is not located where people previously thought it was. Rather each individual has a unique brain pattern underlying his or her language ability. Women tend to have patterns that result in greater verbal is than men. A like the Cray computer a persons first language is tightly organized in terms of nerve cell circuits. Second languages Are More loosely organized in the brain which is Why it often takes longer to find words in them but a stroke in one part of the brain can Knock out a native language and leave later Learned languages intact a or vice versa a different Asp cos of language such As proper nouns common nouns and irregular or regular verbs Are processed in different areas of the brain. But these areas do not Send their signals to a common destination for integration As if language appeared on a cinemascope screen in the brain. Rather language and perhaps All cognition Are governed by some As yet undiscovered mechanism that binds different brain areas together in time not place. The most direct insights into the brains organization Lor language come from neurosurgeons who take the Opportunity to record nervous activity in patients brains during operations. By mapping the location of nerve cells that produce language the neurosurgeons Are revolutionizing established notions of How language is organized in the brain the traditional View holds that spoken and written language Are processed in two structures Broca a and Wernicke a areas found on the left Side of the brain. The right Side of the brain was believed to handle spatial tasks and not to be involved in language. But the brain s language areas Are not so neatly compartmentalized said or George Ojemann a neurosurgeon at the University of Washington in Seattle who is a leading brain mapper. While it is True that most people have essential language areas on the left Sido of their brains he said some people have them on the right Side and others on both sides. Even More surprising Ojemann said is that each person appears to have a unique pattern of organization for language Abili Tyas unique As facial features or fingerprints Broca s and Wernicke s areas Are indeed important language processing regions in most people he said but Many additional language areas Are found elsewhere in the brain two left brain regions called the temporal and parietal lobes of the left brain Are particularly Rich in multiple language areas he said. Each essential language area is composed of a sharply defined Patch of nerve cells each about the size of a grape Ojemann noted the cells in each Patch appear to be connected to Many others located in Distant parts of the brain. Different patches govern language functions such As Reading identifying the meaning of words recalling verbs and processing the words and grammars of foreign languages he said Page 14 the stars and stripes tuesday september 24. 199 the stars and stripes Page 15
