People with Incredible Memory May Not Be Remembering More Correctly Than Us

Every now and then we hear stories of amazing memory skills like those who can remember so many digits of pi or miraculous people capable of recalling what they were doing at an exact time many years ago. If you’ve read my previous blog on sleep and memory, you’d know this is a skill I am far from having, so there is a lot of envy here. However, in Andrew’s (2013) recent article, “People with Superhuman Memory Are as Fallible as the Rest of Us”, it is discussed that this rare human power could be somewhat of a fraud. People with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or HSAM, are said to be a very small fraction of our population and possess crazy memory skills (Andrew, 2013).

In Cleary’s (2013) article, research has been done on those with HSAM and how their ability to recall such fine details of every day came to be. She said it’s easy enough to assume those with HSAM were lucky enough to be born with differently put together brains than the norm, but could it be something else? The strange thing was that it was found that these special brains were only enhanced in autobiographical memory but nowhere else. Though a lot more research on this subject is still needed, it was believed that they found an improved connection, or transferring of information, in the neural pathways, leading to a stronger hold of information. The idea that maybe these HSAM persons could have actually developed this change in neural activity came about, though. Looking at those who are musical protégés, we usually see they started out young, and their brains’ activities work differently than the average person. Using this idea of training from a young age, an actress with HSAM was asked about what she did during her childhood, and she said she’d play a memory game with herself, trying to remember events of every day, every week, and so on. Training the brain from a young age could be playing a role in setting us up for a stronger, more efficient memory (Cleary, 2013).

Here is Part 1 of a 60-Minute video on HSAM (This part is under 14 minutes long.): http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/endless-memory-part-1/

If people having extraordinary memory are supported, then why did I mention these they could be faulty? In the past, there have been false memories that led to injustice. There are situations where detailed information is needed, such as recalling important events from a murder case; these can depend on witnesses. Can we trust others’ memories? Granted, while numerous peoples’ recollections are taken into account and compared, and we often have no other option than to question witnesses and check for DNA, but sometimes we strongly rely on those eyes and ears when DNA testing fails to produce helpful results.

Patihis et al. (2013) pointed out that in the past, those with HSAM were rumored to not be as inclined to false memories like the rest of us normies. In other words, normal people can forget what happened three Tuesdays ago, but if asked, we may make something up, believing it to be true. Suggestions can make us forget the exact event. So if I told you to remember what happened at that party three weeks ago (assuming you weren’t drunk), and you took a minute to think as I snuck in something about a fire starting, you, out of lack of memory, might agree there was a fire and add to this hot story. I might know there was never a fire at that party, though. So if someone with the incredible memory power such as those with HSAM can recall events so well, can they be just as influenced by suggestion? How do they pull information out so easily? Patihis et al. (2013) took a group of HSAM participants and a control group without this memory skill and put them through three tests: a false-memory associative word list task, a misinformation task, and a nonexistent news-footage task. In the false-memory associative word list task, they were given 20 lists, each 15 long and relating to a main word or event they never physically saw. As it turned out, both the control and the HSAM groups were equally likely to be distracted by unrelated words, though the HSAM group was a slightly more likely to get more hits on recognizing the correct words. In the misinformation task, in two slide shows of two events, there were 50 images each. Later, participants saw two narratives, each with 50 sentences – six sentences being misinformation and unrelated to the true events. Those with HSAM had a similar result of false memory to the control, perhaps even a tad bit higher but not significantly. In the nonexistent news-footage task, the crash of United 93 in Pennsylvania was the event used. Participants were told that there was footage of the event out there, and a detailed interview was given to see if they could recall seeing the footage that doesn’t really exist. Of the HSAM participants on the computer questionnaire, 20% said they saw this footage, and 29% from the control group said they saw it. In the actually interview, only 10% of HSAM participants said they saw it, and 18% from the control said they saw it. There was not a significant difference between the HSAM and control group’s false memories, showing that HSAM is just as susceptible to false memory as anyone else. Patihis et al. (2013) did also state that the word-list task demonstrated an associative grouping HSAM individuals use to reconstruct their memories, and they add information that happened after the event in the process as well. They are still just as vulnerable to memory distortion during this reconstructive process as we are (Patihis et al., 2013).

These reconstructive processes, which involve numerous actions of perception and processing, such as experience, emotion, semantic memory, etc., are important for those with HSAM. These sorts of information are important for all of us, really, as far as memory goes. I’ve learned in my Introduction to Biological Psychology course that the Hippocampus and Prefrontal Cortex are very active during the making of a memory, there are different types of memory, REM sleep is important for filtering out unimportant information to aid in learning a.k.a. important memories, memories are stored across the brain and really have no specific area that holds all of them, and there is a lot of reactivation of neurons involved to create long-term memories. Honestly, though, we are not so different, rather I believe we take in information differently in the sense that some people choose to focus on creating memories. Basically, I’m agreeing with the hypothesis that we change how our brain works from events in our youth. What do you guys think? Do you agree with that idea? We already know our brains can change; I mean, how do you think we learn? But can we train our brain to change its design to help us gain superhuman memory? If they are just as susceptible to false memory as us, should we focus on their recollection of events? I mean, they do still have a greater memory, but is it always accurate?

 

References

Andrews, B. (November 19, 2013). People with superhuman memory are as fallible as the rest of us. Discover. Retrieved from http://discovermagazine.com/

Cleary, A.M. (January 9, 2013). People with extraordinary autobiographical memory. Psychology Today. Retrieved from http://www.psychologytoday.com/

Patihis, L., Frenda, S.J., LePort, A.K.R., Petersen, N., Nicholas, R.M., Stark, C.E.L., . . . Loftus, E.F. (2013). False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals. PNAS. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1314373110

Get More Sleep

Growing up, my mother never really enforced too many rules; my two older brothers and I were good kids. Mom worked all day, so chasing after little ones in the middle of the night would take too much energy. We went to bed when we were pooped. The logic was that if we stayed up all night and were exhausted for school in the morning, we would have to get through the day tired and hopefully learn our lesson. Of course, that turned out to be wishful thinking. Today, one brother sleeps half the day away at different time schedules each day. The other has working shifts that constantly change to give him little sleep, making him constantly grump. I am nocturnal, wanting to sleep whenever the sun wakes. Often I sleep very little during the week and sleep in all day on the weekend. With each of us thriving on coffee to continue about our day, you can imagine our health is not the best. Sadly, though, we’ve gotten use to this to some degree, despite not enjoying the results. However, one issue all three of us have complained about for years was our poor memory and attention spans. In fact, now that I think about it, my mother, who stays up all night worrying about the next bill or how she’s going to finish her filing tomorrow, never gets enough sleep. She too has complained about having a horrible memory. Heck, my 90-year-old Grandmother reminds us of events! So what’s going on?

I’ve known sleep is important to recharge your batteries and help you be more attentive when awake, but why has our memory gotten so awful over the years? It’s actually kind of scary to think about. Telling stories is so difficult anymore since we can’t usually recall small details of what happened even an hour ago. Out of curiosity, I searched the internet for any news that may enlighten me, and the results showed headliners on a lack of sleep leading to an increase in Alzheimer’s, genes changing, permanent damage to attention, hallucinations, and even the risk of heart disease.

Video from J. Howard’s article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/11/recovery-sleep-loss_n_4077471.html

In a news article, written by Jacqueline Howard (2013), she mentions the ever so famous purpose of the weekend – catching up on sleep. Do you sleep in on a Saturday after a busy, grueling week? Well stop it! She says the American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism has been researching the effects of a lack of sleep, and what they found was unfortunate. As it turns out, while sleep does help us in recovering, reenergizing, and filtering out the excess crap from our brains, it does not fix all of the damage we have done on those sleepless night of worrying about a project or staying up to play videogames. Scientists took 30 healthy, normal adults and gave them a 13-days sleep trial where the first four days a normal sleep schedule of eight hours was used. Just like how we sleep less during the week, they had to wake up early the next six days, and the remaining three days, acting as the weekend period, there was ten hours of sleep… which sounds lovely, actually. The loss of sleep had decreased participants’ scores on attention tests and increased inflammation agents in the blood, but the recovery period those results did improve. The bad news is the fact that out of the whole test group, attention did not improve well. Even an hour can make a difference. If you do not get enough sleep, your stress levels could increase and immunity response could decrease. Genes are even affected, and a lot of them at that! There is also a connection with chronic diseases and the lack of sleep, meaning adults should not only aim to get around the known seven to nine hours of sleep, but adults, and those with chronic diseases especially, should aim to keep a normal sleep schedule even on the weekend. There is still some good news, though! Naps are a good idea; the payback of sleep is not necessarily a bad thing, but to get too much of it and overwork the tradeoff between your damaging lack of sleep and the recovery period, it is like stretching a rubber band over time. It looks to return to its original length, but little by little, you will stretch it out so badly it will snap. All in all, they suggest you keep a regular sleeping schedule, no matter the day, because it can actually aid in falling asleep and getting up feeling refreshed and keeps you on a normal time schedule without feeling like your feet are dragging (Howard, 2013).

Alright, so how does sleep affect your long-term memory, then? As a nocturnal, videogame slash caffeine addict, this may be important to know. Upon my search, I found a peer-reviewed journal article discussing the importance sleep has on our brains processing system. In Born and Wilhelm’s (2012) paper, they start with discussing how we can learn new things without forcing what we already learned out the other ear. There exists a standard two-way model on memory where information we take in while awake has some junk in it we don’t need. The pool of information, while sleeping, goes to the declarative memory system. What we have are two memory storage banks – one for short-term memory in the Hippocampus and one for long-term memory in the Neocortex. The information we take in during the day must be consolidated or added to our previous knowledge to aid in learning. During our awake period, our brains are encoding that information, so to prevent an interference of encoding, processing, and storing that information, we sleep. During sleep, system consolidation takes place where reactivation of our memories help to distribute that information we’ve recently taken in to distribute to our long-term memory. To do this, during our slow-wave sleep, the body takes the new information, sends it to our Hippocampus for temporary storage, where the information that was actually more weakly coded but held emotional coding is more likely to be sent on the Neocortex for long-term storage. What happens during this process is determined by the level reactivation. In the Neocortical, slow oscillations pass the info to the Thalamo-Cortical Spindles. Then reaching the Hippocampal ripples, reactivation occurs and undergoes this process numerous times. The more it does, the better it is stored in the Neocortex, which also strengthens the long-term memory (Born, & Wilhelm, 2012).

So we need a regular sleep schedule at seven to nine hours a day. Short naps are safe, but too much sleep could lead to health problems and diminishing attention over time. Also, our slow-wave sleep is important to maintain in order to code, process, and store newly incorporated information into our long-term memory banks, as well as exercise our ability to remember. With that in mind, I guess that explains my crappy memory. I’m guessing my poor sleeping habits, where I take hours to fall asleep and hate waking up, means I have little time to spend in NREM and little time in REM as well. This may prevent my brain from getting the rest it needs to have the required attention to take in those experiences for later processing, and it also might be disrupting the needed time for the actual process itself. If that intake of information is not being exercised through processes, my memory is going to suck all around. I guess it’s obvious I should just start going to sleep on a regular schedule for health all sorts of benefits, and I should stop sleeping in on weekends as well. Yet, somehow it has become addicting to sleep the hours I do. I have tried to set an alarm for when I should go to bed and all that happens is I lie there, feeling depressed and unable to turn my brain off. Does anyone have any suggestions for this other than counting sheep? Counting at night doesn’t help in the slightest…

References

Born, J., & Wilhelm, I. (2012). System consolidation of memory during sleep. Psychological Research 76(2), 192-203. doi:10.1007/500426-011-0335-6

Howard, J. (2013, October 11). Recovery sleep may reverse some, but not all, effects of sleep loss, snooze studies suggest. The Third Metric. Retrieved from http://huffingtonpost.com

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR)

              For years I have experienced a strange, hard to describe, sensation in my body and my head whenever I thought of the sound of a fan or when my hair was being played with. These thoughts and activities would give me what I thought were chills, and the hair on the back of my neck would raise, including goose bumps. Whenever a friend would ask me what was wrong, I would just reply with, “I make myself cold when I think of ice cubes”. Of course, this sounded odd, but how was I supposed to explain this weird, pleasurable feeling they were causing without creeping anyone out? It was not until under a year ago I came across Youtube channels labeled “ASMR” with titles describing role playing as eye doctors, hair dressers, whispering fortune tellers and so on! This was very odd, yet as many good Youtube addicts do, I obviously had to click the link and find out.

                Many descriptions in the users’ videos do explain what ASMR is and even go into detail on the subject. From what I have gathered from those descriptions over time is that ASMR is not technically a proven… thing. In fact, I have trouble finding any research on it in EBSCO Host and Google Scholar. We do not quite understand exactly what it is or how it works, but studies are still being done since this feeling does occur in numerous individuals, and we want to understand how it works.

                Well let’s start with what it is characterized as. ASMR is described to be a tingling sensation from the head, spreading down the spine and outward towards the limbs, caused by a trigger. According to ASMR Research and Support (2013), there is a Type A, internal, and a Type B, external triggers. Type A involves thoughts, such as thinking about the sound of a hair dryer and you feel tingles and may even grow tired. Type B is the external activity causing the effect, such as going to the hair dressers and feeling tingles as they comb through your hair. Every individual is unique and may experience different levels of both of these triggers. Unfortunately, ASMR Research and Support is still ongoing and looking for participants to gather and interpret the data for later explanation on the topic, so there is not a lot of information that has been gathered yet (ASMR Research and Support, 2013).

                Then what have we gathered on how it might work? Could it be a release of dopamine or endorphins? How do the visual, physical, or verbal stimuli trigger such a strange response that always leads from our head down our spine? The nervous system, more specifically, neurons must be a part of this in my opinion. Similar responses are seen in individuals but through different stimuli, so how can these different forms of activity be sent in to the body causing similar reactions? I imagine the information being taken in by our sensory neurons as electrical information, traveling toward the interneuron, and reaching our motor neurons and pleasure center of the brain, causing the physical response. Perhaps it is also caused by the hormones from our Pineal glands. But some individuals experience the sensation more strongly than others while some do not experience any feeling at all. If the effect of ASMR is different for everyone, including the types of triggers that may work for some or may be different for others, then would that not mean we are all wired uniquely? I think maybe it is due to a difference in excitatory and inhibitory neural circuits in the body, but this still does not explain why hearing exams can be done using standardized tests to compare the ability of an individual’s level of hearing. I have learned in my Sensation and Perception class using the Signal Detection Theory that we all observe the same stimuli, but we perceive it differently, often caused by different response biases, such as one individual being conservative, meaning they are likely to say they do not hear the stimuli when they are unsure, and liberal, where an individual is more likely to say yes if they are unsure. The participants’ chances of guessing correctly or incorrectly were still 50/50, however, showing their hearing was very close, yet they gave different answers. Could this be related to the experiences shared by those with the tingles? But then how is it that some individuals do not feel anything or sometimes they do, but over time it goes away?

                In Harry Cheadle ‘s (2012) blog post, ASMR, the Good Feeling No One Can Explain, he says that the only information you will find on it is from minor websites created by those who have experienced it themselves. Cheadle also explains that there have been many skeptics, to the point where an entry on Wikipedia was even taken down for lack of scientific evidence, but we cannot just say it does not exist if thousands are reporting the same experience. Alas, there is still no answer from this writer who made contact with several professional Neurologists, those in charge of experimental research, and even ASMRers.

                Even Neurologist, Steven Novella (2012), could not come up with an answer. He mentions how he too has searched this topic expansively, where zero peer-reviewed articles have been found mainly due to this topic’s continuing research. His guess, however, is considering small seizures which can be caused by what we hear and can feel good. His other hypothesis considers the diversity of individuals’ brains. If we all have our own personalities, like our own things, choose differently, and so on, so it makes sense that we would have different responses to the ASMR’s stimulus. Novella refers to the pleasure response; our brains react to pain and pleasure in different ways, and we have a uniquely evolved form of feedbacks meant to help us survive. So are we tampering with that natural system, is my next question?

                Many people experience this tingling sensation, including myself, yet it has not been proven to exist through scientific evidence. Neurologists, Psychologists, doctors, those currently studying the phenomenon, and even the ASMRers themselves have no idea on how it works. There are many theories out there, including my own, and still so many questions. What do you think about ASMR? Youtube ASMR and try it for yourself!

 

References

Allen, J. (2013). Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Retrieved from ASMR Research & Support website: http://www.asmr-    research.org/

Cheadle, Harry. (2012). ASMR, the Good Feeling No One Can Explain [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.vice.com     /read/asmr-the-good-feeling-no-one-can-explain

Novella, Steven. (2012, March 12). ASMR [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/asmr/