A Psychological Reflection Research on Memory, Language, and Altruism
1. One of the first things that interested me is how the memory works. We are taught to believe our minds and our perceptions of the past and present, but modern research shows that memory is the most unreliable thing. I wanted to understand how, but also why that happens.
Because every act of remembering is re-writing the neural connections in the brain, “The more we remember something, the less accurate our memories become” (Abumrad, Krulwich, 2007). However, there is hope still. Observations on well-known patient HM showed, that it takes 11 years for the memory to become concrete (Medina, 2008). Before that, it relies on hippocampus to retrieve the information (and in the case of retrograde amnesia, it disappears). But in 11 years the connections between hippocampus and cortex disappear, and finally, the memory lays still in the “hard drive”. “It takes years to consolidate memory to its final form”, says Medina (2008), but what is interesting is why it takes so long. Perhaps, thus is due to humans’ highly adaptive nature. Memories can be rewritten because our perceptions can be false. If we rely on faulty information retrieved from faulty memories, we have fewer chances of survival. Our mind has no other way to differentiate truth from a lie but by comparing it with other external information. This means, that if something has not been contradicted for 11 years, by memory’s logic, it must be reliable. Perhaps, there will be the difference in how the memories that are located in “hippocampus-and-cortex” storage and “cortex only” storage can be changed differently.
2. Another topic that got me interested is language, but specifically swearing. It is interesting because it is present in every language, and it is similarly different from the ordinary words. Sometimes, people who lose their ability to speak after a stroke, keep their swearing vocabulary unharmed (Kloet, 2013). Children are especially quick to pick up naughty words. There is even a neurological syndrome, characterized by ticks and uncontrollable outbursts of swearing – Tourette syndrome.
What scientists found is there are two major brain regions that are connected to swearing. The first is basal ganglia, which is responsible for inhibiting inappropriate behaviors. It is malfunctioning in people with Tourette syndrome. Another region that is activated during swearing is the limbic system, the emotional center of the brain. “Swearing is more about expressing an emotional state … cursing is also considered a kind of automatic speech”, researchers say (Kloet, 2013). Because of that, people often use curses to relieve stress. Findings show, that it can do as much as enhance pain tolerance (Jay, Janschewitz, 2012). There is also a connection to the personality: extroverted and type A people swear more, and conscious, agreeable, sexually anxious and religious people swear less. Probably, this is because the latter make more effort to control their behavior and more supportive of cultural taboo on curses. Most interestingly, findings show that the taboo …
