How We Make Memories: Crash Course Psychology #13 — Transcript

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1. 0:00Clive Wearing was playing the piano alone in his room.
2. 0:03When his wife came into the room, he immediately leapt up and embraced her with joyful enthusiasm.
3. 0:08A minute later, she slipped out to grab a glass of water, and when she returned, he
4. 0:13gave her that same bright greeting, as if she’d been gone for days.
5. 0:17And then he did again.
6. 0:18And again.
7. 0:19Clive was an accomplished London musician, until, in 1985 at the age 47, he contracted
8. 0:25a rare Herpes encephalitis virus that ravaged his central nervous system.
9. 0:30Since then he’s been unable to remember almost any of his past, or to make any new
10. 0:35memories.
11. 0:36His wife is the only person he recognizes, but he can never recall the last time he saw
12. 0:40her.
13. 0:41This may be the most profound case of extreme and chronic amnesia ever recorded.
14. 0:45Our memory helps make us who we are.
15. 0:48Whether recognizing loved ones, recalling past joys, or just remembering how to, like,
16. 0:52walk and talk and fry an egg, memory is the chain that connects our past to our present.
17. 0:58If it breaks, we’re left untethered, incapable of leaving the present moment, and unable
18. 1:04to embrace the future.
19. 1:05But memory isn’t an all or nothing thing, of course.
20. 1:08Wearing can’t remember any details about his personal past, but he still remembers
21. 1:12how to speak English, get dressed, and play the piano.
22. 1:15Some memories you process automatically, and they are stored differently than your more
23. 1:19personal or factual memories, like, your first kiss, or how to recite pi to twelve places,
24. 1:23or who won the Peloponnesian War.
25. 1:24Speaking of ancient Greeks -- and to help demonstrate what I’m talking about -- I
26. 1:28want you to have a look at our Spartan friend here, and remember his name.
27. 1:31‘Cause we’re gonna test your memory in just minute.
28. 1:38[INTRO]
29. 1:42Technically, memory is learning that has persisted over time -- information that has been stored
30. 1:49and, in many cases, can be recalled.
31. 1:52Except of course during the exam!
32. 1:53Our memories are typically accessed in three different ways — through recall, recognition,
33. 1:58and relearning.
34. 2:00And if you think about all the different kinds of tests you’ve taken in school, they’re
35. 2:03all actually designed to size up how you access stored information in these ways.
36. 2:08Like, recall is how you reach back in your mind and bring up information, just as you
37. 2:12do in fill-in-the-blank tests.
38. 2:14So if i say, BLANK is the capital of Greece, your brain would hopefully recall the answer
39. 2:19as Athens.
40. 2:20Recognition, meanwhile, is more like a multiple-choice test -- you only need identify old information
41. 2:25when presented with it.
42. 2:26As in: which of the following was NOT an ancient city in Greece: Athens, Marathon, Pompeii,
43. 2:32or Sparta.
44. 2:33And relearning is sort of like refreshing or reinforcing old information.
45. 2:37So when you study for a final exam, you relearn things you half-forgot more easily than you
46. 2:43did when you were first learning them, like, say, a basic timeline of the Greek empire.
47. 2:47But how?
48. 2:48How does all of that data that we’re exposed to, all the time, every day, become memory?
49. 2:53Well, in the late 1960s, American psychologists Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin figured
50. 2:58out enough about the process of memory-formation to break it down into three stages:
51. 3:02First, it’s first encoded into brain, then stored for future use, and then eventually
52. 3:07retrieved.
53. 3:08Sounds simple, but by now you’ve figured out that, just because you take a lot of stuff
54. 3:12about your mind for granted, that doesn’t mean it isn’t complicated.
55. 3:15By Atkinson and Shiffrin’s model, we first record things we want to remember as an immediate,
56. 3:20but fleeting, sensory memory.
57. 3:22Think back to the image I showed you a minute ago.
58. 3:24Do you remember his name?
59. 3:25If you do it’s because you successfully managed to shuffle it into your short-term
60. 3:29memory, where you probably encoded it through rehearsal.
61. 3:32This is how you briefly remember something like a password or phone number-- hey Tommy,
62. 3:36what’s Jenny’s number?
63. 3:38Okay.
64. 3:39867-5309...867-5309… 8-6-7-5-3… see you’re getting it in your head there.
65. 3:47Or in this case, I told you to remember that guy’s name, so maybe you were thinking “Leonidas”
66. 3:51repeatedly over and over, even if you didn’t think you were doing it.
67. 3:54But this information really only stays in your short-term memory for under thirty seconds
68. 3:58without a lot of rehearsal.
69. 3:59So if you weren’t repeating “Leonidas,” you’d probably have
70. 4:02forgotten it already.
71. 4:03Because your mind, amazing as it is, can really only hold between four to seven distinct bits
72. 4:09of information at a time--at which point, the memory either decays, or gets transferred
73. 4:13into long-term memory.
74. 4:15Long-term memory is like your brain’s durable and ridiculously spacious storage unit, holding
75. 4:20all your knowledge, skills, and experiences.
76. 4:24Now, since the days of Atkinson and Shiffrin, psychologists have recognized that the classical
77. 4:28definition of short-term memory didn’t really capture all of the processes involved in the
78. 4:32transfer of information to your long-term memory.
79. 4:34I mean, it’s more than just being able to remember some Greek guy’s name.
80. 4:37So later generations of psychologists revisited the whole idea of short-term memory and updated
81. 4:43it to the more comprehensive concept of working memory.
82. 4:46Working memory involves all the ways that we take short-term information and stash it
83. 4:50in our long-term stores.
84. 4:52And increasingly, we think of it as involving both explicit and implicit processes.
85. 4:56When we store information consciously and actively, that’s an explicit process.
86. 5:00We make the most of this aspect of working memory when we study, for instance, so that
87. 5:04we can know that Athens is the capital of Greece, and that Pompeii was a Roman town,
88. 5:08and not a Greek one.
89. 5:09This is how we capture facts and knowledge that we think we’re going to need -- like
90. 5:12I told you specifically to remember Leonidas’ name, you concentrated on that detail and
91. 5:18filed it away, if briefly.
92. 5:19But of course we’re not conscious of Every.
93. 5:21Tiny.
94. 5:22Thing that we take in.
95. 5:23Yet, our working memory often transfers stuff we’re not aware of to long-term storage.
96. 5:28We call that an implicit process, the kind you don’t have to actively concentrate on.
97. 5:32A good example might be classically conditioned associations, like, if you get all sweaty
98. 5:36and nervous at the dentist because you had a root canal last year.
99. 5:39You don’t need to pull up that file on the last time you got your face drilled to think
100. 5:43oh hey, oral surgery!
101. 5:45Not my favorite!
102. 5:46Instead, implicit processes cover all that stuff automatically.
103. 5:49This kind of automatic processing is hard to shut off-- unless you’ve got something
104. 5:52unusual going on in your brain, you may not have much choice but to learn this way, like
105. 5:57how you learned how to not put your hand into a fire.
106. 6:00That learning would have happened pretty much automatically as soon as you first yanked
107. 6:03your hand away from an open flame.
108. 6:05Whether things are lodged in there explicitly or implicitly, or both, there are also different
109. 6:10kinds of long-term memory.
110. 6:12For instance, procedural memory refers to how we remember to do things -- like riding
111. 6:16a bike or reading - it’s effortful to learn at first, but eventually you can do it without
112. 6:21thinking about it.
113. 6:22Long-term memory can also be episodic, tied to specific episodes of your life -- like
114. 6:26“remember that time that Bernice fell out of her chair in chemistry lab and started
115. 6:30laughing uncontrollably?”
116. 6:31Man, good times.
117. 6:32There are other types of long-term memory, too, and we’re continually learning more
118. 6:36about the biology and psychology of the whole complex phenomenon.
119. 6:40For instance, while Clive Wearing’s episodic memories (among others) seem to be deeply
120. 6:45affected, his procedural memories for things seems to be in one piece.
121. 6:48This has to do with neuroanatomy that we don’t have time to explore here, and that we don’t
122. 6:52yet fully understand -- Wearing and others have a lot to teach us about the different
123. 6:57types of long-term memory storage.
124. 6:59Now, for healthy memories, there are lots of little tricks you can use to help remember
125. 7:02information.
126. 7:03Mnemonics, for one, help with memorization, and I’m sure you know a few that take the
127. 7:06form of acronyms--ROY G. BIV for the colors of the rainbow, for instance.
128. 7:11Mnemonics work in part by organizing items into familiar, manageable units, in a process
129. 7:16called chunking.
130. 7:17For example, it may be hard to recall a seven-digit number, but it’ll be easier to commit it
131. 7:21to memory in the rhythm of a phone number: 867-5309.
132. 7:23Or you could just, you know, write a song about it.
133. 7:27Strategies like mnemonics and chunking can help you with explicit processing, but how
134. 7:31well you retain your data can depend on how deep you dig through the different levels
135. 7:36of processing.
136. 7:37Shallow processing, for instance, lets you encode information on really basic auditory
137. 7:42or visual levels, based on the sound, structure or appearance of a word.
138. 7:46So if you’re trying to commit the name Leonidas to your explicit memory, using shallow processing
139. 7:50you might encode the word by recalling the cool font you saw it in.
140. 7:54But to really retain that information, you’d want to activate your deep processing, which
141. 7:58encodes semantically, based on actual meaning associated with the word.
142. 8:03In this case, you might remember the story of the mega-tough yet very scantily clad warrior
143. 8:08of ancient Greece.
144. 8:10Or you might remember that “leon” means “lion” in Greek, that lions are tough
145. 8:14fighters, and that Leonidas was a tough Spartan warrior-king.
146. 8:18And then to really, really make it stick, you want to connect it to something meaningful
147. 8:20or related to your own personal, emotional experience.
148. 8:24Like maybe Gerard Butler’s bronzed eight-pack torso and unconquerable blood-lust helped
149. 8:28lock down the words Spartan and Leonidas in your forever memory.
150. 8:31I mean, maybe.
151. 8:32If … if that helps you.
152. 8:34In the end, how much information you encode and remember depends on both the time you
153. 8:37took to learn it and how you made it personally relevant to YOU.
154. 8:42Memory is extremely powerful.
155. 8:43It’s constantly shaping and reshaping your brain, your life, and your identity.
156. 8:48Clive Wearing is still himself on the outside, but in his inability to recall who he was,
157. 8:53or process what has happened, he has lost some critically important part of himself.
158. 8:58Our memories may haunt us or sustain us, but either way, they define us.
159. 9:02Without them, we are left to wander alone in the dark.
160. 9:06If you were committing this lesson to memory, you learned about how we encode and store
161. 9:10memory, the difference between implicit automatic and effortful explicit processing, how shallow
162. 9:16and deep processing work, and a few types of long-term storage.
163. 9:19Thanks for watching, especially to our Subbable subscribers, who make this whole channel possible.
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166. 9:32This episode was written by Kathleen Yale, edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant
167. 9:35is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat.
168. 9:37Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins, the script supervisor is Michael Aranda, who’s
169. 9:41also our sound designer, and the graphics team is Thought Café.