A Memory Without Limits: Prof. Giuliana Mazzoni at TEDxHull

strange arrival let me start by asking you a few questions can you remember what you did on the 3rd of August 1986 I cannot see anything but I'd like you to remember if you remember and then if you remember come and see me later or can you remember what you did this is easier closer to us what you did on the 28th of March 1992 and again if you remember and if the memory comes up like this very quickly can you raise your hand can anybody remember what you did well nobody remembers and I don't remember either and why we don't remember well because it's very easy we forget we forget our memory is built in a way that it allows things to go and within the first 20 minutes after learning something we have forgotten already almost 50% of what we have studied or acquired and in social situations when I introduced myself where I introduced as a memory expert people don't say oh look what a wonderful thing my memory is I am so pleased with my memory usually people say can you help me I forget so much I forget where I put my keys for the car and then I forget where I parked my car and then I forget to do my grocery shopping the very essential things for the day and knowing that I didn't really write everything down and then I forget the list and so can you help me and my reaction is usually I'm so sorry I'm just like you I have no hints on how to do things I might you know there are these techniques mamno techniques that people can use but I don't strongly strongly believe in them and certainly they don't help you that much remembering where you or the car but is memory only flaws is memory only forgetting no it isn't memory is really a wonderful system that we have I think that one of the most important cognitive components of our mind and memory is what allows us to learn from experience memory is the skill that accompanies us from birth to death and is what makes it possible for us to know how to walk how to turn a handle how to ski it teaches us it allows us to know what a table is what a bottle is but not only that it's not just acquisition of knowledge or factual knowledge memory is also a factual knowledge that allows us us to graduate eventually but knowledge is also about ourselves basically our memory is our identity because we are what our memory tells us we are we are what we remember about our past if we think about people with profound forms of amnesia these people not only don't remember who I am if I talk to them the day after but they don't remember about themselves they are lost their their identity is cut down there really are confused and it's a very very difficult condition to live in so our memory needs to be reliable needs to be something we can count on because it makes us who we are and of course it is spontaneous given this condition that we trust our memories if I remember going to the movies three weeks ago with John that friend of mine and then going out for dinner and having a lamb chop and I remember the taste of the lamb chop and I remember that it was not that be and I remember my emotions during the movie and I remember how happy I was to go out with this person etc then all these details the vividness the emotions the colors the perceptual details that come with a memory tell me that that memory has to be true and we all share basically a belief that our memory is like a video camera when we walk through experiences these experiences are recorded sound the visual component and they are represented they are maintained in some parts of our mind of our brain and they stare they stay there until we need them and when we need them we just go and pick them up and the event unfolds in front of our eyes well is this the right conception to have about memory should we really trust our memories what 30 years of research has shown us is that actually memory is not like a video camera this is a naive conception that is based on a more widespread idea of how our relationship with the world works which is naive realism we think that the grass is green the snow is white but actually it isn't there is no greenness to the grass there is no whiteness to the snow as Bertrand Russell reminded us many many years ago and a visual illusions are a good example the fact that what we see even if we believe in what we see and we use it to negotiate with the world what we see is not necessarily what is out there so consider for example these horizontal lines and this is a very well-known perceptual illusion these horizontal lines are parallel do you see them parallel does anybody see them parallel I don't believe so with some zigzag with is some things that are tilted go in one direction another direction but actually trust me they are parallel we just have need to have a different frame of reference in order to see them as they are but spontaneously we sees them as we see them and not as they are in reality the same thing is true for these other this is a very well known perceptual illusion and this receives two horizontal lines of different lengths the one on the on my right is certainly shorter than the other that's what we see but actually that's not the way it is those two lines are exactly of equal length and I don't have the animation here to show you but you need to trust me and so as we have these perceptual illusions when receiving we also have illusions when we remember things because memory is not the way we conceive it typically memory is malleable memory creates illusions and we live with our illusions where our entire life without knowing it so for example if I read to you a list of words and I'm going to read them thread pin eye sewing sharp point prick thimble haystack thorn hurt injection and then I asked you to remember these words starting from the very last ones that are read and of course I take the words away then you will remember 65% of you and more will remember a word that has never been presented the word needle and not only you will remember the word needle but you will remember the word needle in detail so for example if half of the words are spoken by a female voice and half are spoken by a male voice you will be able to say whether the word needle was presented by a female or a male voice and if half of the words were presented in black ink and the other half in red ink you'll be able to say whether they a word needle is presented was presented in a black or red ink and it was not presented of course you will say this is just limited to this very simple phenomenon but no it isn't we also have the possibility to really change the memory of that that we have about events and about real-life events let's suppose that you're witnessing a car accident and there are two cars and then I ask you a question do you remember the color of the car of the cars that touched each other you will be very likely to report something like this but if I asked you to remember the color of the court two cars that crashed into each other your memory at least 25% of the people responded that way would be more like that you'd be more likely to report physical injuries greater damage and even the estimation of the speed of the car that which the two cars hit each other actually would be greater in the second case than in the first case this of course has these real-life situations have repercussions for eyewitness testimony and that's not limited which is something that the British police knows very very well and they are quite ahead of time in their in their procedures trying to keep track of that and it also happens in identifying a culprit and especially in lineup procedures when you have to identify the person who actually committed the crime and you make incredible mistakes and you make mistakes with great confidence because your memory tricks you at that point unbeknownst to you what we've been talking about up to now is this possibility of changing adding deleting changing details of a memory but actually what the research has done and I've done a lot of work on this is that it's possible to show that it is possible to create completely new memories out of nothing so if I ask you for example imagine a nurse in your mind sighs imagine a nurse nurse hair but the the face they hide the body build etc etc and then imagine the nurse performing a small surgical intervention taking out a little piece of skin for a test from one of your fingers well trust me in one week couple of weeks again 25 percent of you will remember this event as if it happened to you even if it as such it never happened to you and if I am identify for example present dr. photos hey you are here this is the real this is the real you in a real photo with your father and then there is a hot-air balloon right as you never took but I put your photo on the hot-air balloon and then I show you the picture guess what again 25% of the people will remember a hot-air balloon that never happened and in all these cases they will remember the event but they will remember the event in details and they will come up with stories and emotions and reactions in the stream then the nurse study for example people were commenting about how their mother reacted to their reactions if the the mother was pleased or not pleased or you know was giving them gifts etc etc and and this is not true only for lab studies it is true in everyday life there are a number of what are called crashing memories people remember events that they could not possibly remember because they were never shown so a number of people remember when the car in which Lady Diana was travelling hit the tunnel well it was never delivered that video was never Shout other people remember the first plane hitting the first tower in in New York on September 11 again this was before the video was released but people were swearing that this is what they saw and in a recent study what we have shown is that this magic 25% of people have at least one very vivid compelling memory for something that never happened to them and they realize they are certain that it couldn't happen to them because these memories are about flying unaided being chased by dinosaurs you know being abducted by aliens well the bigger doctor the aliens don't happen in England I don't know why they tend to happen elsewhere but anyway and and and even if they absolutely reject the event you know it's impossible but they have still this very very vivid compelling memories that tells them that you know if they had to trust their memories it must have happened so what does this series of work 30 years of war tell us that metric memory is not like a video camera memory is reconstructive when we retrieve something when you try to find a memory we reconstruct these various elements that we have put in sparse and scarce elements and we build on them because when we encounter an experience what we do we do extract the information the information is abstracted and that is put here and there in a another parallel station in our brain and then when we retrieve we put all these elements together this is the received wisdom this is the result of 30 years of of research but I say so far because do you remember my first question can you remember what you did on the 3rd of August 1986 well in 2006 a paper came out saying claiming that there is a lady who can remember exactly that on the 3rd of August 1986 at 12:34 p.m. she remembers a man she was in love with called her on the phone but she remembers she claims that you remember almost every day of her life for example on March the 28th 1992 she had lunch with my father which was my other question to you and all this with details every day of her life of course my reaction for these forms of highly superior autobiographical memories was well these are false memories of course you know this person just confabulate and the problem of the studies is that the authors have not checked with enough rigor the accuracy of these memories she makes us up things and of course being personal memories nobody knows if they're true or not so I went around and my quest for people with these forms and I spread news all around and with the help of the public relations office at the University of Hull and what I found were people who are calling me saying well maybe I am that person maybe I have that skill and we ask these people hundreds of questions about dates we gave that dates and we ask them to remember and there were people who actually remembered this was the memory for the 20th of December 2009 I'm not going to read this because I don't have time but you can read this and the point is that this is very very detailed very very detailed and I just summarized it it's not the conflicting otherwise I've written two pages just over that memory this is the first of May 2006 again an extremely detailed memory with all the elements in it even you know odd things like being asking somebody to buy a folder and this folder was Salman pink even remembering things like that so are these memories accurate what we found out we asked for factual details and what we found out is that yes they are accurate and it was really for me a revelation so what it means is that these memories these people are from a different species they're like us what happens in their brain is the brain different or similar to us and so the only thing that I can tell you right now is that their memories are differ and that they actually access these memories immediately it takes less than two seconds for them to come up with a full-blown memory and that their visual errors are extremely highly activated and so what what this leads us to think is that while maybe there are some people whose memory is like a video camera and that's what we're trying to study now and we're trying also to train people that's the next project to become better at their memories by stimulating those areas that are the specific areas that are different in these people from us thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 309,814

Keywords: Brain, mind, psychology, english, health, ted, tedx talks, england, tedxhull, science, ted talks, tedx talk, You, memory, tedx, lifestyle, ted talk, ted x

Id: i6wI4ekUebw

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2013