Psychology 2: How Your Memory (Really) Works

1. Introduction!: Hi, My name is Andre, and I'm a psychologist and neuroscientist with more than 10 years of experience, and in this course I want to show you how our memory works and how our brain secretly add. It's our memories without us being aware of it. Everything we know about the world is based on information stored in our memory. But what most people don't know is that our memories are not just passive recordings of our past. Storing a lifetime of information is a complex task, and our brain needs strategies to deal with it. And part of these strategies is that our brain does not just passively record of our past. Instead, it actively edits our memories with the result that sometimes we remember and what happened are two entirely different things. In this course, I'm going to guide you through the amazing complexity off our memory. I will show you the strategies that our memory is using and why are memories are far less accurate than we like to think they are? I will also show you techniques to memorize information more effectively, and I will show you what role memory place in our everyday life and how it relates to other processes in our mind during the course will also tackle a number of questions such as. How do we remember? Why do we forget what causes amnesia? Why can't you trust witness testimony? Why does your brain added our memories? What makes information memorable? How does memory relate to social processes and psychological problems? And if you have other questions, I will be happy to answer those as well. This course is for everybody, wants to learn how our memory works and for everybody wants to understand the human mind in detail. 2. What is memory?: hi and welcome to this course. I'm Andre and I'll be your instructor in this course. And as you know, this course will be about memory. And the first question I want to tackle here is what actually is memory. And more specifically, what does it mean in our everyday life? Because usually what people think off when they think of memory is things like reading a book or learning foreign examined, basically learning things by heart. And what I want to do in this lecture is give you a different perspective on that by showing you an experiment that has to do with babies and the people who have done my other psychology course, the quick psychology course already know this experiments. He may want to skip this lecture, but for everybody else, this will be new. And the way this experiment works is that there's a baby seated at a table and on the table that researchers put a toy and babies usually like toys, that what the babys will do is they want to grab the toy they want to reach for the toy. And then the researchers place an obstacle between the toy on the baby so that the baby can see the toy anymore. And the researchers did that with very young babies, pretty much newborn babies, and with babies that were a little bit older, which were basically a few months old. And the two groups of babies behave quite differently. The younger babies basically completely stopped caring. Once the obstacle was in place, it was as if they had never seen the toy before. They completely stopped reaching for the toy and just acted as if they had never seen the toy before. But for the older babies, this wasn't true at all. The older babies kept reaching for the toy, even when the obstacle wasn't place, signaling that they still wanted the toy. So what is going on here? Why are these two groups of babies acting so differently? And the answer is that the younger babies don't have memory yet, So once the obstacle is in place, it is to them as if that toy never existed because they can remember it. And the reason why I like this experiment is because it illustrates very well what our memory means to us in our everyday life. Our memory provides us with context. It gives us contacts in time. It integrates the present moment with the past because our past only exists in our memory. And it provides context in space spatial contexts, because without memory, the only thing that I concede right now is was right in front of me. Everything that's behind my back or outside of this room, or even outside of this city is invisible to me and only exists in my memory. So memory is not just about learning things by a heart. Memory is literally our world. Memory is what provides us with most off the things that are part of our world. Without memory, we wouldn't know about our friends. We wouldn't know about our family. We wouldn't know where we are. We wouldn't know when we are. We wouldn't know who we are. We would virtually be nothing without memory. So memories are world. With that in mind, do you think that our memory is trustworthy? And usually people have this unshakable confidence in their memory but doesn't actually hold up to research? Can we actually trust our memory? And the shocking answer is no. Well, sometimes we can, but in many situations we really can't because our brain doesn't just passively store memories. It added to them, it fabricates false memories, and therefore we cannot always trust our memory. But okay, I'm getting very far. I had no, I'm just want to give you an idea where we're going with us. Let's start at the beginning. Let's start with the basics of how memory works and let's work our way up to the problems memory has and to discovering why our memory works the way it works. 3. Course overview: okay, Before we really get into the course, I want to give you just a very quick overview over what's going to come in the first section. I'm going to show you the main building blocks of our memory. And I'm going to show you how you can use that to explain phenomena such as amnesia and also other phenomena such as the recency effect. Then in the next section, we're gonna look at the processes that are going on when we try to remember something. And we also gonna tackle the question Can we actually trust our memory? And you're going to see that in many situations we actually can't. Then in the next section, we're gonna look at the processes that are going on when we learn new information, and I'm going to show you the main principles and some techniques that can help you memorize stuff more effectively. And finally in the last section, going to zoom out and have a look at how the things you learned about memory in this course relate to other topics and psychology. Okay, these are the main sections of this course. Let's get started with the building blocks 4. Working and long-term memory: in this lecture, we're gonna look at the basic building blocks off memory on the main distinction you need to learn is the distinction between working memory and long term memory. And our working memory is basically the space of our memory that we use to think for active things. Because if you want to think, then we also need to store our thoughts somewhere in our memory. And the part of our memory that is responsible for that is the so called working memory is the part of memory with which we work. And all information we initially received initially arrives in our working memory. So you could say that our working memory is the first stage of our memory hour long term memory. On the other hand, is this huge archive off all the information. We know all the knowledge we have about the world, all the memories we have about the past and to memorize something about a long amount of time. We need to send it from our working memory, where it initially arrives to the long term memory. So you could say that the long term memory is the second stage of our memory, so Let's use a little analogy to make that a little bit more vivid. Imagine you're sitting in your office and you're trying to think about things. How would you do that? You may want to take a note pad, right? Your thoughts down. Strike through what you don't like, added what you prefer. Andi, basically be very active on a note, but you can be very active. You can add things. You can remove things. You can change things, So this is what you could call your. Working memory is the memory in which you're actively playing with its content. But sometimes you may need information that you don't have available right now, but you know that it's somewhere stored in your books. So what you do then, is you walk to your library, you search through your books, you retrieved the part of information that you're missing, and then you go back to your note pad to write it down there. And then you can keep scribbling and thinking and adding things until you arrive at whatever results you want to arrive at. And this is pretty much also how our brain uses are working memory an hour long term memory . So our working memory and our long term memories serve different purposes, and therefore they also have different properties. On the one hand are working. Memory has very low capacity, but it is fast and it is conscious, and that makes it suitable for active work, but not for storing large amounts of information. Hour long term memory, on the other hand, has a huge capacity, but it is slow, so it wouldn't be suited for thinking with it. But it is more suited for just storing information and the information hour long term memory is unconscious until it gets back into our working memory, and we call the transmission off information from working memory to long term memory encoding and the transmission of information from long term memory working memory retrieval . So encoding basically means to learn something, to memorize it for the long term, while retrieval means to remember it later. Okay, so that's what working memory and what long to memory are and what they do for us. But how do we actually know this? What's the evidence that there's a working memory and long term memory and their many kinds of evidence, But I want to show you one piece of it to illustrate that to you. And the piece of evidence I want to show you is called the Recency Effect. And the Recency effect basically intends that we remember recent stuff very, very well. So if you, for example, were an experiment where people continuously need to remember stuff item after item after item, maybe word after word after word or number after number after number and you create a graph with on the X axis. How reason something is so the further you go to the left on that access, the more it was in the past. And the more you go to the right, the more it is recent. And on the y axis you plot. How many people remember that particular item then? What you can see is that memory for past items is usually not that great. But then, for the very reason items, there's suddenly a jump upwards. Many people remember those recent items and that's called the Recency effect. So why does that happen? Why do remember recent items better? And the answer is that for recent items, we basically have two memories to support us we don't just have only are long to memory, but we also have our working memory and that causes people to remember these items better. So that's one piece of evidence that shows us that there is not just a long term memory, but there's also a working memory. Okay, so I think you get now the two main building blocks of our memory and how they worked with each other. Now let's apply that in an example in the next lecture, when we look at amnesia. 5. Amnesia: When memories disappear: in this election, we're gonna talk about amnesia, and you've probably already heard about amnesia, and you probably already have an idea what it is. But let's still have a look first, how it is actually defined and amnesia is basically a deficit and memory caused by brain injury. Very often this happens because the person has some accident. The person has a trauma to the head, gets hit on the hat somehow, and then suddenly the person has amnesia. So that's what amnesia is in the general sense. But what most people don't know is that there are two main types of amnesia. There is retrograde amnesia, and that's the amnesia people usually think off when they think about amnesia. And there's an terror. Great amnesia. So what are the differences between those two? Essentially, if you imagine that this arrow here stands for time and this is the moment where the brain injury occurred, then retrograde amnesia is in amnesia, where Onley memories that happened before the accident are effective. So what happens is that the person can't remember all of the things anymore that happened before the accident and terror. Great amnesia, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. It means that the person cannot remember things any more than happened after the accident. So another was. The problem here is that the person can't make any new memories. And even though when you think about amnesia, you probably automatically think off retrograde amnesia. You probably have seen interrogate amnesia as well in movies, for example, so one famous movie in which you could have seen Antero grade amnesia is the movie Memento . Another example is Finding Nemo. If you remember Dorry, the Blue Fish, she had interrogate amnesia. She was constantly forgetting everything that was happening. Another example is the movie 51st Dates, where a guy has 51st dates with a girl because the gold cannot remember the first date every time it happens. So interrogate. Amnesia is basically this situation where the person says, Hi, I'm Andre. And then after a moment Hi, I'm Andre. Nice to meet you because the person can create any new memories, and so everything is forgotten after a short amount of time. So that's amnesia. We have interrogate amnesia, and we have retrograde amnesia. Now let's apply our knowledge from the last lecture to see whether we really understand it to explain these two types of amnesia. And let's start with interrogate amnesia. And my question for you is what in the system that we discussed in their last lecture is broken and therefore possibilities. It could be that the working memory is broken, or it could be that a long term memory is broken. Or it could be that encoding is broken. Or it could be that retrieval is broken. So four possibilities. If you like past the lecture for a moment and think about it, which off the four is broken? Interrogate, amnesia. And if you like, I can give you a little hint. Because in the movie Memento that keeps saying that the main character is lacking shorter memory as an explanation for why he always forgets everything. He doesn't have short term memory, and that is wrong. This is usually something that people misunderstand about memory. If that were true, then the person would literally not be able to function because if you don't have short term memory and by short term memory, they mean working memory, and if they don't have that kind of memory, then that person couldn't even think because working memory is the place where the active part in our mind takes places where we think it's where our consciousness resides. And without that kind of memory, the main character would literally not be able to speak. This person couldn't for many sentences without booking memory, so that's not what the problem is. The problem is not that working memory is broken. Working memory is working fine in integrate amnesia. It's something else. So if you want pause, otherwise I will give you the answer. Okay, so the answer is that the thing that is broken and interrogate amnesia is encoding basically the transmission from working memory too long to a memory. And then what happens is that the person can still remember things for a short amount of time, namely for as long as things resides in working memory. But then, at some point working memory capacity is full and old stuff gets pushed out of working memory, and it just can't go into long to a memory. And then it's lost forever, and that leads to this condition where person goes like high. I'm Andre A. I'm Andre and so on. Okay, so that's how interrogate amnesia works. And it's also another piece of evidence that we have a working memory. Because if we wouldn't have the distinction between working memory and long term memory, then it will be very hard to explain how something like Antero grade amnesia could actually happen. All right, let's move to retrograde amnesia. And the question is exactly the same. What off? The four things that we discussed in the last lecture is broken. Is it working memory? Is it long term memory? Is it encoding, or is it retrieval? And to make it really, really clear, let's say that the person was retrograde. Amnesia has it only temporary, so the person forgets something about his or her past for a while. But then, after a week or two, it comes back. And by the way, this is something that really happens in retrograde amnesia. Memories that are lost open come back after a while. They don't come back always, but they often do. So which part is broken? Pause the lecture. If you want to think about it for yourself, Okay, Which part is broken in the case where the person has lost memories but gets them back well Let's first talk about what it can be. It can't be long term memory, because if the memories themselves were broken, if they were lost, then how could they come back instead? What seems to be the problem is the memories are still there, but for some reason that can't be accessed. Or, in other words, they can't be retrieved. So the problem here in this case seems to be a retrieval problem. Very often, people spontaneously thinking, If you have amnesia, then your memories are broken, right? So basically your long term memory is broken, and that may be true. In some cases, we don't know. But that may be true in some cases, but if the memories come back later, that can't really be the explanation, because how would they come back if they were completely lost? And I hope you can see in these examples that the distinction between working memory and long term memory is really, really useful. It helps us to explain phenomena such as the recency effect and also amnesia. All right, that was the lecture on amnesia in the next lecture, we're gonna look at long term memory in a little bit more detail, and we're going to see that they're actually different kinds of long term memory 6. What is stored in our long-term memory?: in this lecture, we're gonna have a look at the different types of memory that are in our long term memory because there's not just one type, and we know that because one type of memory can get broken while the other type is still intact. So let's have a look at what type of memories we have there in the hour long term memory. And the first distinction you need to know is the distinction between declarative memory and procedural memory. And the difference is that declarative memory is about knowing facts is basically about knowing what while procedural memory is about skills, it's basically about knowing how to do things. So the knowledge of how we walk, how we write the bicycle, how we drive a car, that is all procedural knowledge while knowing what happened yesterday and what your name is and what my name is, that is declarative memory, and you can notice that these are two different types of memories in your own everyday life . So, for example, one situation where I noticed that these air really two different types of memories is when I type in the pin code off my bank art when it's I've been the pin code of my bank card. I don't really remember what the code is and said My fingers are basically moving automatically. They just know where to press. And it happened once that I was on a holiday in Spain and I wanted to withdraw money. So I talked in my pin code and I got an era. And as it turned out, they had the number keys in different locations and all of a sudden I was I was completely puzzled because I thought, Damn, it's I don't remember my PIN code. I just know how to type it in. So I basically had to remember where the numbers usually are when a type in my pin code, and then just do the movement and see what numbers are pressed because I could not remember the pink coat. I had no declarative memory off the pin coat, but I did have the procedural memory off how to type it it, and that's one situation where you can see that there's a difference between declarative and procedural memory, but it doesn't end there. We can go a little bit further and further split up the declarative memory into episodic memory and semantic memory and episodic memory is basically your internal diaries. Your memory off. What happened to you in the past? Why your semantic memory contains all your knowledge about general facts. So if I would ask you how many legs does a dark have that would draw on your semantic memory? And if I'd ask you, what did you do yesterday that would draw on your episodic memory? And both are independent kinds of memories, which we can see for example, in some kinds of amnesia. But we can see is that sometimes people get hit on the head and then they forget what happened to them yesterday. So, in other words, the episodic memory is impaired, but they don't have any impairment of the semantic memory. They still know that this is their hand and this is their nose, and they know all the facts that they knew before. They just have forgotten what happened to them yesterday, and that's because only there episodic memory is impaired, But it can also go the other way around. Sometimes people get hit on the hat, and they still remember everything that happened to them, but suddenly they can remember anymore what the name off something is, or they can remember any more of general historic events. So not their personal history, but the general history. And that's because, in that case, only the semantic memory is impaired. So episode in memory and semantic memories are two different types off declarative memory. OK, we've almost covered all the building blocks of our memory, but there's one more thing that I would like to cover, and that is the role of associations in our memory, and that's what we will cover in the next election. 7. Associations: The memory highway: in this section. I want to talk about the one main building block that I have still not discussed, which are associations because our memory don't just lie in a pile in our brain, they're structured and they're structured by associations and associations are basically links from one memory to the other. They take you from one memory to the other. So in a sense you could say that they are the highway off our memory. They determine how information travels to our memory. So let's do a little example if I say Brett was the first thing that comes to your mind, and the answer may differ from person to person. But for many people, it's butter because many people associate Brett to butter. Likewise, if I say Sunday, then some of you may be thinking off church or sleeping or playing soccer. Whatever you do on Sunday probably determines what you're thinking off when I say Sunday. And that's because these two things are associate ID and the association's determine how information travels from one memory to the next, and the basic principles of associations are really simple. First associations are formed when two things occurred together, so For example, if you usually put butter on your bread, then bread and butter occurred together in your experience, and so they will forming associations with each other in your memory. Or if you usually play soccer on Sunday, then you will have an association between soccer and Sunday. So if two things occur together, they usually Forman association. And the consequence of this is that once you retrieve one of these things from your memory , it will probably also bring the other one to mind because associations basically make sure that one thing triggers the other. And that's a very important part of our memory. So, for example, you look at another person's face. What is it that makes you think of the name off the person? What is it that makes you think when you look at me, that is Andre? Well, the answer is because you associated the name Andre with this face. So once you see this face, it makes you think of my name. So associations are really important part of our memory, and I want to show you a little bit how researches show that these associations exist and that they really do determine how information travels through our brain. And that's through a technique called primary. And the way this works is basically going to show it to you directly. I'm gonna pretend that you are a participant in ab psychological experiment, and I'm gonna show you what the participants sees. So your task is you're going to see a word. And for the first word, the only thing you need to do is to read it. You don't need to do anything else with it, But then I will show you a second word. And for that second word, I want you to tell me as fast as possible. Whether that word is a really a word or whether it's basically of bogus were just a random combination off letters. So let's do it. Here it comes. World number one World number two. Okay, so that was very easy. You saw the word breath as the first word, and then you saw the word Brett again as the second word. And you probably determined, very correctly that that's a real word. The question is now what would happen if he would change the first word to another word like se umbrella and What happens in experiments is that people get slower in responding so people are faster if the word they have to make the decision about whether it's a word or not has been preceded by exactly the same work. So what essentially happens is that the concept of the word in our memory gets, you could say, warmed up. It gets activated once we see for the first time, and that causes us to be faster and deciding for the second word, which is the same word in this case that this is a real world. Okay, so that's the first piece to the puzzle of how we determined that their associations and that they determine how information travels with the break. Now we're going to take it to the next level again. I'm going to show you a word, and the first words doesn't really matter. You just read it. But you don't respond to it. And then for the second word, you need to determine whether that's a real word or not. Okay, here it comes. First words, Second word and you're done. So the first word was butter. The second word was Brett, and the question is now what would have happened if we wouldn't have used the word butter? But, for example, the word umbrella, And the answer is that people are faster if we use the word butter compared to the wood umbrella. So what happened? Somehow? The information must have traveled from butter to Brett, and that happens because of an association. So due to the fact that butter warms you up to respond faster to bread, we know that information travels from one to the other. So there must be an association. And that's our researcher, discover where associations are and what they do. And the first version where you saw the word bread and then responded to Brett that is called prime ing. And the second version will use of butter and then responded to Brett that is called semantic primary, because you're basically using semantically close words to prime the words you actually want to prime. So to sum it up, our memories are not just lying there in a pile completely unstructured in our brain. But they're connected through associations, and these associations make information travel from one memory piece to another memory piece, and that is the essence of how our memory works That makes you think of my name when you see my face And that makes you think of the color green when you think off the leaves off a tree 8. Retrieval: searching through your mental library: in this actually going to talk about retrieval, which is one of the key processes of our memory, and you already know what retrieval is in principle, you know that retrieval is basically transmitting a memory from your long term memory to the working memory. And the question I want to address in this lecture is, How does that work? How do we retrieve a memory? And let's start with the question. What is actually the problem? And the problem is that our long term memory is gigantic. Is the so Gant IQ library with all kinds of information with our memories off our life, with all of our knowledge about the world. And so the problem that our brain faces if it wants to retrieve something from the library , is how does it actually find the piece of information that it's looking for? But okay, before we get into this, let's give this a little bit more structure. The way retrieval usually starts is with a so called retrieval cue and retrieval. Cue is basically the thing outside in the world that is asking for a memory. So, for example, if you look at a person and wonder, do I know that person or was the name of that person. Then the face of the person is your retrieval. Cue. Another example of a retrieval. Cute is a question. An example. If you get a question and exam that basically calls for a memory, you need to find the answer to the question in your memory, hoping that you have it an example way. Use your episodic memory would be, for example, asking What did I do yesterday at lunchtime? And in this case, the lunchtime is the retrieval cue, and it calls for the memory of what you did at that time. So a retrieval cue can basically be anything. But It is always the thing that is calling for a memory, and the way retrieval starts is with a retrieval cue popping up that demands for certain memory. Okay, so what happens after this retrieval? Cue popped up. Imagine you're the receptionist off this gigantic library hour long term memory, and somebody comes in and asks, Do you have this in this book? And basically the book he's asking for is your retrieval cue, and now you're faced with the task. How do I figure out that this book is in our library, and even if it is in our library, how do you figure out where it is? And this basically puts you into the shoes of our bein. So what would you do? What you would most likely not to is searched through the whole library and trying to find the book and said, What you probably ask yourself first is what category does this book belong to? And was the first letter off that books? Because the books have probably sorted alphabetically. And then, based on that general information, you would figure out a way in the library. You could find the book if you have it. And let's make this a little bit more visual. Let's say that these are books. I know that they really don't look like books, But let's just say that they are books. Or you can think of them as memories because our books are basically our analogy for memories and, by the way, apologies for my mediocre drawing skills. And now we have a retrieval cue. So in the library that would be somebody asking for a certain book. For example, the book with a cross on it. Or if we think about memory than this could be a person we're seeing. And we wondering whether we know that person. Let's say that, Yes, this retrieval cue points to something that is contained in our memory. And once you wouldn't do is go one by one through your memory and check here. Is this matching the retrieval? Que no. And the next one note No, no. Yes, that's not what he would do. You would ask yourself first if you were in the library, which Catherine does this book belong to because you know that the libraries in the book belong to different categories. Yeah, these are the categories. Let's see, say that these all belong to the same category and you first ask yourself to what category does the book belong to? Does it belong to politics, or is it a novel or is it something about travel? What is it? And if it's about travel, then you start your search here, and then hopefully you'll find your book very quickly. And that is essentially also how our memory works. For example, when we look at a person than the general categories could be the gender off the person or it could be the nationality off the person or it could be the height of the person. So we basically used the's general properties of a person as a hint to where we need to search for the memory in our long term memory. And if you look at this is a reason why I've drawn this for you. You look at this year, the structure. Then you may notice that it basically looks like associations, right? We're basically traveling from our retrieval cue to our memory through associations. And so this is where the library example and what I told you about associations in the last lecture of the last section comes together. As I told you, associations are the highway of our memory. They take us from the retrieval cue to the memory that we want to find and the most essential thing for our retrieval to work. I'm gonna extend this a little bit. What you say that this has an association here and there and there and there. And the most essential thing for our memory to work is that the retrieval cue has a path leading from where it starts to the memory that we need to find. So we call that a retrieval path, and it's basically a path of associations between concepts of our memory that leads us from what we're seeing to the content in our memory. So without associations, we would literally be lost within our memories, because there so many memories stored in our long term memory that we would basically never find the information back after we have stored it there. And this is also the key to understanding how our memory works and why does the things it does, because we're going to see in the next lectures that our memory is in many cases, not reliable and does things of which we really wouldn't expect that is doing this. But once you understand that our memory faces this fundamental retrieval problem off finding back information, you can make sense off. Why are memories behaving the way it does? So let's have a look at this in more detail in the next lectures 9. Why do we forget?: in this section. I'm going to show you why we forget. And the first reason why we forget is because our information in our memory constantly decays. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that it is gone. So why does our information decay? Well, the answer already came in the last lecture where I showed you that one of the main problems of our memory is to find back information in this huge amount of information that is stored there. So if our memory would store every piece of information forever, then it would never find anything back in this huge pile of information. So what it does, it doesn't store information forever, but just for a certain amount of time. So the first reason why we forget is that information constantly decays over time. But that is actually a relatively unusual reason for forgetting. And it's more applicable to things that lie very, very far in the past, for reason things. A much more common problem is a retrieval failure. So, in other words, the memory is still there. It is still stored in your long term memory, but you can find it and the main difference between a retrieval failure and decay of information is that decays irreversible. If information DK's away, it is gone. You will never find it again in your memory. But retrieval failure may just be temporary. So, for example, have you been an exam before? And you look at a question and he thought, Ah, I know the answer to that question, but I can remember it. And later, when you look at the answer in the book, you think, Ah, off course. And the reason why you think off course rather than seeing something that's completely new to you, it's because it isn't new to you. You already knew it. You just couldn't find the memory in your long term memory. Okay, there's one more reason what we forget. The third reason what we forget is that the more memories we store, the more they interfere with each other. So it is not just the passage of time that makes us forget, such as in the case of Decay. But it's also how much information we encode in that time. So let me give you a little example to disentangle these two things correctly. Suppose I ask you where did you go on your holiday five years ago and suppose that every year you go on a holiday? Well, in that case, it can get pretty difficult to retrieve where you win five years ago. Wasn't the holiday to Spain? I know. That was four years ago. Or was the holiday to Mexico? I know. That was seven years ago. Where did I go five years ago? I can remember it. That's interference. And now imagine the alternative situation where you did also go on a holiday five years ago . But it was the only holiday you ever went to in your whole life. In that situation is probably pretty easy to retrieve where you went to because there aren't any other memories of holidays that could interfere with you. Retrieval of that knowledge. So interference is a problem that gets bigger ass. You encode more information, particularly information that is pretty similar to each other, such as memories off different holidays you went to so there. Three main reasons where we forget. First information constantly decays away over time. To prevent that information piles up like crazy an hour long term memory. Second retrieval problems. It may be that you still have the memory, but you can find it and a specific type of retrieval problem is an interference problem. Where other kinds of information that you encode it leads you away from the correct memory and prevent you from retrieving the correct memory. 10. Retrieval stages: You look familiar but who are you?: in this lecture, we're gonna cover the two different stages of retrieval. Have you ever looked at a person? And you knew that you knew the person, but she couldn't really figure out how it ISS ever happened to you. This is what we call family charity and is the first stage of retrieval. Even before we have succeeded in retrieving the memory that we want to find an hour memory , we may already know that there is a merry in our memory. So basically, what's happening is that we already on a retrieval path, so we know that we're going somewhere, but we haven't finished the path to the memory yet. And so although we know that we're going somewhere or memory, we're still not sure where we actually going. And so we know that we know what we're seeing, but we still don't know what it is or who it is. And that's the family clarity stage of retrieval. The second stage, when we actually find the memory is called recollection and usually those moments where we have Onley family, charity, but no recollection. So we only know that we know in principle, but we can find the memory. That's when we have a retrieval cue that is useful to some extent, but just not good enough to find the memory. And a good example is, for example, when you meet some person that usually see like your bunch are. But you see him on the bus, and the problem here is that, of course, you have the face over the person, so you do have a pretty good poetry. Look you as to who that person is. But what's missing is the butchery around the face of a person. And so the face of the person is just not enough to get you fully to the person in your memory, so sometimes were not able to recollect the memory. But then we still open know that we have the memory. We know that we know, but we don't know what it is that we know. For example, we know that we know the person, and while this can be useful, it can also turn are very problematic because we don't really know why we have this feeding of familiarity on a study that illustrates well that this can be problematic is a study that was conducted in which participants saw a stage crime and then, after the crime, actually, like a week or two later. There's so much shuts off potential criminals. But then it turned out that Oh, no, actually, those were in the people who participated in the crime. And then again, a few weeks later, the participants were shown another Siri's off mark shots, and now they were asked who of these people participated in the crime on a reality. Nobody participated in the crime. None of the people shown on the pictures that the participants saw participated in the crime that the participants saw. At the very beginning, however, even though none of the suspects participated in the crime, participants had seen them, but not during the crime. But during the first Siri's off mark shots. And so even though participants hadn't seen them committing the crime, they should feel that their faces look familiar. And, as it turned out for those people, participants were quite likely to say that this person committed the crime. What happened was that these people remembered that they had seen this person before. They had this feeling of familiarity so that they could say, I have seen this person before, but they couldn't remember where they have seen this person before, so they could not disentangle that they did not see that person in the crime but in the picture that they saw after the crime, and we call that a misplaced familiarity effect. Sometimes people have this feeling of familiarity, but then they misplace it. They think they have seen that person in a different situation than they have actually seen that person. And in the example of the experiment that leads to an innocent person being convicted for a crime, So familiarity, as useful as it can be, can also be problematic, because when we misplace it, then in a very serious example, an innocent person may go to jail. 11. Similarity and memory confusions: in this section. I want to show you another reason where you can trust witness testimony. If a person says I saw this person committing a crime, you can't necessarily trust that in the last section we already saw one reason, which is the family charity effect. Sometimes people think they have seen a person in the crime, but actually they saw that person somewhere else and just felt the familiarity from seeing that person. But there's another thing that can cause people to say This is the culprit, even though that isn't the culprit And that's similarity. Suppose your witness and you're looking at a line up of suspects and suppose that all the suspects are innocent. But one of the suspects looks just a little bit similar to the culprit of the crime. What happens in that situation? If our memory is perfect, it will realize that the person we're seeing right now in the lineup of Suspect is not the same person as the person that we saw committing the crime. But the thing is that our memory is not perfect. All memory does not encode all information it could encode, and sometimes the information it in Khost so crude that it leads to mistakes. So suppose, for example, that when we remember about the person is not really a photographic image of the person, but just a rough description off the persons. Who says that the person is having short here well, brown here and a slim body, and that description can turn out so vague that it actually matches many, many people. And if that description also matches one of the suspects that it can happen that a witness says, I think I saw that person committing the crime, even though that's an innocent person. And the crazy thing is that to the witness, it can really feel as if that witness saw that person committing the crime, even though that's not really true, even though what the witness remembers, it's just very, very crude and doesn't really lead to an accurate conclusion. And obviously that's a huge problem, and it gets worse. This is especially likely to happen for faces for people with faces that were not practiced in perceiving yet. If you followed my last course on perception than you know, that perception is actually a very complicated process, and it takes practice and effort to perceive a face correctly, and that's also true for memory. We have better at memorizing faces that we used to see. So, for example, if you're usually surrounded by white Americans, then you will be less accurate in remembering the face of an African American person. And that makes it relatively likely that you make this mistake that you think that the person you saw is the person you saw before committing the crime. But actually, it's just that your memory is so in perfect and so crude that the information you remember just fits many, many people. So the similarity effect where we think that we saw this person committing the crime just because this person looks similar to the other person we saw is worse for people with facial features that we're not used to seeing very often. So it is really important to realize that our memory is not always accurate. It makes a lot of mistakes, and in the case of witness testimony that can have serious consequences. And that's one of the reasons why nowadays, witness testimony has much less weight in court. Then it used to have in the past, so a memory makes a lot of mistakes, but it doesn't stop there. I haven't actually told you the worst thing about memory yet because our memory doesn't just only make mistakes. Sometimes when it tries to figure out whether what it is seeing is matching a memory, for example. But sometimes our brain literally makes up memories. It makes up memories of things that never actually took place. And that's what we're gonna look at in the next lecture and the next lecture. We're going to see that our brain is making of memories and why it is doing this. 12. Why you cannot trust your memories: in this lecture, I'm going to show you what happens if our brain actually succeeds in finding the correct memory. In the last lecture, we saw that our brain can get stuck on the way, in which case we just feel familiarity. Or it can be fooled by a retrieval Cuba. What if we see a retrieval cue and we actually find the correct memory? Can we trust our memory in that situation? And the unfortunate answer is again, no. So why can't we trust our memory? Even if the brain succeeds in finding the correct memory Well, to illustrate why that is the case, let me ask a little question. Do you think that our memory is either something passive, which works pretty much like a hard drive, which this passively stores information without editing it in any way? Or do you think that memory is something active where the things we remember have been edited by our brain and may not be equivalent anymore to what happened in the past? If you're like most people, then you probably have the idea that our memory is something relatively passive. It just stores information, But is that actually true? In order to see whether there's actually true. I want to show you an experiment that started with a simulated car crash that the participants observed at the beginning of the experiment. And then, after the participants saw the car crash, they were asked some questions. But the exact phrasing of the question was different for the participants. For half of the participants, the first question was, How fast were the cars going when they hit each other? And for the other half of the participants, the question was, How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other? So the difference years between hit and smashed into each other, and in the first group, the response of the participants was, on average, 34 MPH. But in the second group participants on average said that the cause we're going 41 miles power. So, in other words, the phrasing of the question influence what they remembered. But it doesn't stop there. In the first group, 14% of the participants reported that they saw broken glass and there was no broken glass during the accident. So what they remembered was an incorrect memory. And in the second group, 32% thought that they saw broken glass. And again there was no broken glass during the accident. This is an incorrect memory. So there two interesting things happening here. First, participants remembered something that wasn't actually there. And second, the likelihood that participants remember this something that wasn't actually there was increased if the question was phrased differently if it was raised with smashed into each other. So what researchers learn from these kinds of experiment is that you can actually influence somebody's memories and actually plan things in there that weren't actually there. And the question is, how far can you go with this? This is a question researchers asked themselves, and so they invented crazier and crazier and crazier experiments to test us and when I want to show you now is some of the highlights off crazy things. That research has planned it in another person's memory, doing psychological research, and I think the researchers themselves were actually surprised that this worked. But it did work, so I want to give you three highlights. First, researchers planted the memory that the participant nearly dropped. Second, they planted the memory that the participants were attacked by a vicious animal, and the success rate in this particular experiment was 50% and third researchers planted the memory that the participants were processed by a demon. So this all really happened. This is all part of the history of psychological research on memory, and it shows you how dramatically memories are flexible and how actively our brain added czar memories. So what you remember is not necessarily the same as what happens. Okay, Now the question is, why does our brain do that? Why doesn't it just leave the memories as it ISS? Why doesn't have to added them? And part of the puzzle is that Allah brain doesn't actually encode as much information as we tend to think. We think that we have a relatively rich memory of things, but that's because our brain fills in a lot of gaps in what we encode it in reality, when we encoded are just fragments of information. And then once we retrieve that memory, our brain pauses it together, fills in gaps and added things in a way that it makes sense. And then most of the time, that actually fits what happened in the past. But sometimes it doesn't. So. Memory is pretty much working like a detective that has some clues as to what happened in the past. But ultimately it has to go beyond the data given and deduct what happened based on the information given. And sometimes the deductions are correct. And then we remember what really happened. But sometimes the deductions also wrong and then remember something that didn't actually happen. And that's also why you can't necessarily trust witness testimony in court. Even if the witness has a very vivid memory off a certain person committing a crime, that memory may be based on a wrong reconstruction off the events so busy what happens is that the memory the witness has off the person committing the crime is actually very fragment them very incomplete. But the witness doesn't realize that because our brain just fills in the blacks. It basically looks at the suspect and things. Did I see a woman with brown hair? I guess I did. And did she have brown eyes? I guess she has. And then what we remember is the conclusion of this guesswork were not aware that our memory is engaging in this guesswork to us. It's just what happened. So memory is not passive, but it is reconstructive. It reconstructs what happens. Much like a detective does. But how does our brain actually do this? And why exactly does it do this? We're gonna look at this in more detail in the next election. 13. Schemas: How your brain edits memories: in this section, I want to show you one of the main strategies that our brain is using to store and reconstruct our memories. And if you understand that strategy, I think you're a great deal closer to understanding how our memory works. And to begin with. I want to tell you about a little experiment, and it's a really, really simple experiment. Basically, what happens is that the participants first just wait in the office of a professor. They just asked to wait there until the experiment starts. And then they were led to a second room, and in that second room they were asked to recall what they saw in the office off the professor. And that was already the whole experiment. And as it turned out, 1/3 of the participants thought that they saw books in the office of the Professor, even though there were no books in the office of the Professor. So they thought that they were whole shelves of books, even though there wasn't anything like that. And the question is now, Why did so many participants remember books in the Office of the Professor, even though there weren't any? And the answer has to do with how our memory works. Our memory works through so called scheme s and here's how it works. There are a lot of things in our life that repeat themselves over and over again and that we experience over and over again. For example, if we walk into the office of a professor than in most cases, we will see books there, so we will see that over and over and over again whenever we see the office off a professor . Likewise, if we walk into the living room of a person, we usually see a TV there. Or if you walk into the bathroom of a person, we usually see a bad there. So there's information that repeats itself over and over again as we encounter it. And it would be really wasteful to store that information again and again and again and again. And so that's not what our brain is doing. Our rain doesn't save information again and again and again and said it kind of makes a note saying this is how generally is. For example, there are generally books in the office of a professor, or there is clearly a TV in the living room, and this general knowledge is what we call a schema. And what our brain does is it creates schemers for everything that repeats itself. And then it doesn't encode that information anymore as we encounter it again. And that's one of the reasons why our episodic memory is usually very, very incomplete. We don't encode all information that we encounter, but the upside is that we save a lot of storage space, which makes retrieval a lot easier. So it is actually something that is an hour advantage, and that also takes us back to our distinction between episodic and semantic memories. Because essentially, what I just said is that there's a pile of memories off unique things that happened to us, and there's a pile of memories off things that happen to us many, many, many times and these things that essentially are generic knowledge. The books we saw many, many times is our generic knowledge in our semantic memory and the officers that were specifically saw in the little details that differ from office to office that would be in our absorbing memory. So are being used. The scheme US and their two functions that schemers fulfill First they say storage space because rather than saving information over and over again, you just save it once. And that helps us with retrieval and basically help us prevent that hour long term memory gets completely cluttered with information. And then the second function off scheme us is that it helps us to reconstruct memories. It fills in gaps in our memories and therefore gives us a more complete picture of what happened with the disadvantage that sometimes that information may be wrong and that we remember something that wasn't actually there. 14. Encoding: How to learn effectively: in the last elections. I told you a lot about the process that are happening during retrieval when we try to remember something and I find it back an hour long term memory In this lecture, I want to move to the other side of the coin, which is encoding the things that need to happen when we try to create a new memory. An hour long term memory on what I want to do in this lecture is show you some of the principles that can help you and code something more effectively so that you're more likely to retrieve it later when you try to remember it. So let's get started with the principles. One of the most basic things you can do is rehearse. Repeat something over and over again, and that's something you probably already knew. Another thing you can do is Chungking, and Chungking basically means that you melt information together to make it more digestible to your brain. So a situation where you see that, for example, is when you look at telephone numbers, usually the numbers are not just not just listed right after each other, but their spaces in between, so that When you see 9 to 6, you actually don't think of it as 9 to 6. But as 926 for example, that's an example of chunking. You take some information, for example, numbers, and then you put them into separate chunks. And those chunks will be more digestible than all the numbers individuals. So two very basic things you can do. A rehearsal and Chungking. Those usually worked pretty well for relatively simple information, but they become limited for more complex information. A strategy that is more powerful for complex information is depth off process. The deeper you process something, the more likely you will be to retrieve it later when you try to remember it. So what depth of processing basically means is to get as deep as possible into the meaning off something in a simple strategy. How you can do that is to look for examples off something in your own everyday life. There's a very effective strategy, and that's also why I use this strategy a lot. In my course, remember, for example, the distinction between declarative memory and procedural memory, which I explained to you with the example of where you try to a type in your pin code or a telephone number. And even if you don't remember the number, you may be able to remember where to press the buttons so that you actually know the number in a procedural way. And what that does is it gives you an example from the everyday life where you see the distinction between procedural and declarative memory, and what that does in more abstract terms is it creates a retrieval path from your everyday life from the knowledge you already have to the memory that you later want to retreat. And as you have seen in the last lecture is, one of the most important things is that you have a good retrieval path to the memory that you want to retrieve, and finding examples in your everyday life is a very good strategy to achieve just that another way. How you can process the meaning of something more deeply is by finding analogies. That's also something I used in this court's. For example, when I explained the distinction between working memory and long term memory to you, I used the analogy off a note pad in which you can scribble and strike through things and added things on the bookshelf were used toward larger amounts of information. But it takes you some time to find back that information and what that is not really an example, because our working memory is not a note pat, but it is much like of note pad. So it's an analogy, and it's an analogy that you can easily connect to the knowledge that he already has. So that again, there's a retrieval path from the knowledge you already have to the new memory that you want to remember later. So death of processing going into the meaning of something is a really powerful strategy to make something more memorable, but there's more they can do. Another thing you can do is basically marking something as more important to your brain, because the main problem with remembering something is that your brain is very resistant to storing new information. Your brain wants to prevent that your long term memory gets cluttered information and so it will store information on Lee. If that information seems important, the question is now what seems important to your brain and, well, one thing that really doesn't seem important to your brain is very abstract information that you only read about in the book and one way how you can mark something as important to your memory is through the use of imagery. Use images connect what you're trying to remember to very vivid images. Make it as vivid as possible because images are about the stuff that is in front of us or at least was in front of us in the past. And that's a signal to your brain that this is not just abstract information that has nothing to do with your life. But this is something we actually encounter and hence which is important. Another strategy by which you can mark something as important is through emotions. Make something as emotional as possible. Make a dramatic make a ridiculous because things that are emotional seem important to our brain. The one situation where I use that, for example, was when I had to learn brain anatomy and brain anatomy is very abstract, and it has virtually nothing to do with your everyday life. So I had to come up with strategies to remember all the stuff I had to remember, and one of the things I had to remember is that the parietal lobe is on top off the temporal lobe. The prize will open the temporal lobe are both part of the cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain, and I had to remember that the parietal lobe is on top off their temporal up. And the way I made this more memorable is by imagining that the prize a loop is a kind of bully who is sitting on the temporal lobe and the temporal over shouting. You know that you're only gonna be there temporary, right, and this is an image, and it's ridiculous, and it's dramatic because somebody gets bullied. So it's, it's vivid and it's emotional. It has all the aspects of being memorable, and it worked for me after that. I've never forgotten that the parietal lobe is above the temporal up, and chances are that you also going to remember it for a long time now. Okay, there's one more thing I want to cover in this lecture, and that's that you want to create retrieval cues for yourself. Ideally, the best way to approach this is to learn, For example, if you're learning for an exam is to learn for the exam literally in the room where you're gonna have the example. Because the closer the context in which you have to retrieve the memory is to the context in which you had to learn the memory, the more likely it is that you're gonna be able to retrieve it because you're gonna have a lot of retrieval. Cues off course is rarely possible, but where you can do is prepare some retrieval cues for yourself. So one example for my own life is that wasn't exam. I had to remember the five personality traits by which people differ the most and those personality traits, our openness to experiences conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, an eroticism. And I had to remember them, but very often would forget at least one of them. So I had to find a way to make them more memorable to me. And I did that. But finding the acronym Ocean, the word ocean, the letters in the word ocean are exactly matching the five personality traits. And so what I did is I just wrote the word ocean on my pencil case when I went to the exam , and it's not really cheating because I didn't really ride the correct solution on the pencil case. But I did give myself a very good retrieval cue that would help me to find the memory off those personality traits in my long term memory. And that's also something you can do for yourself. Prepare retrieval. Accused to make sure that you can find back the memories in your own long term memory. So the things you can do our rehearse junk information together to make it more digestible . Process things deeply. Look for meaning fine examples. Find analogies tak things as important to your brain by making them vivid by using images and by using emotions. And finally prepare retrieval cues for yourself. All right, so these are general principles that make our encoding more effective. And in the next section, I want to show you a more specific technique that uses a number of these principles to help your memorize stuff better. 15. Mnemonics: Expand your memory capacity: in this lecture. I want to show you how you can use the principles off the last lecture to create powerful memory techniques called harmonics. And they're people who use these techniques to achieve incredible things such as memorizing , say, 100 digits in one minute. And the way this works is by combining the principles I show you in the last lecture, especially the last principles, by using prepared retrieval cues by using images by using emotions and that allows them to memorize a vast amount of information. And in this lecture, I want to show you an example where we try to remember numbers using a mnemonic technique and to make it a little bit more simple, we're gonna use only three numbers. We're gonna use 12 and three, and the first thing we need to do is create retrieval. Accused for these three numbers and the retrieval accuse I've chosen are aflac a sickle and a chance earlier, and they're simple reason why I've chosen them is because they remind me off those numbers . And the first step to using this memory technique is to associate these images to the numbers. So it takes a little bit of practice at the beginning, and at the beginning, the technique may actually not work so well for you, but the more practice you gathered it, the more powerful it will get for you. Now, using these three images, which will be our retrieval accused. We now go further to memorize this number, and this is a number that is not super long. So you could actually use rehearsal pretty well here to memorize that number. But if that number where say 20 digits, then probably reversal wouldn't get you that far. And then the technique that I'm showing you now would be more effective. So here's how you use the technique to memorize this number. You basically come up with a story. The more vivid the better, the more emotional the better. Which uses the three things that he used at the beginning in the story in the order the numbers appear. So I'm going to give you an example. I'm going to tell you a story that makes it more easy to memorize this number. Here it comes. It was in the middle of the night when the man lighted the chance earlier and went out into the garden to find the place he had marked with a flag. Yesterday, he held the generally low and uses sickle to cut of one off the plants. Then he used a sickle again to cut off another plant. He put the channel ear aside for a moment to pull the flag out of the ground, then picked up the channel ear again, put the sickle back into its pocket and walked away. Okay, now that we have the story that connects the numbers with each other, we can use that story to retrieve the numbers. So let's recall what this story waas in the middle of the night. The man lightens and chandelier, and he went out to find the flag in the ground. Then he uses the chance earlier to shine some light down, and he used the sickle to removal plant and then use the sickle again to remove another plants. Then he puts the gender Lear asides to remove the flag from the ground and then picks up the channel ear again, puts the sickle into his pocket and walks away. So this literally how it works and it takes a bit of practice before that technique becomes really effective because you need to learn to make the association between the images and the numbers, and you also need to get better in creating stories that are really, really memorable. But the more you practice this, the more your memory capacity will explode and hasn't said before. This technique becomes especially useful for large amount of numbers for small amount of numbers. You probably can memorize it a lot faster using rehearsal, but for a large amount of numbers, he will probably better off using this technique and the reason why this works are the principles from the last lecture. So first we create retrieval cues. We have the images that we associate with the numbers. Second, we make everything very vivid. We have a story that we can actually imagine and pictures, and we also make it more emotional because in this story there's also some suspense. What is this man doing in the middle of the night? Where is the story going on? That makes it more memorable. So in principle, this technique is just an application off the principles that I showed you in the last lecture, and if you want to, you can use it or you can create your own technique using the principles that I showed you 16. Course summary: you have no arrived at the final section of this course and in this section I'm gonna first give you a summary in this lecture off the things that we discussed in this course. And then in the next lecture, I'm going to show you how the things you learn in this course relate to other topics and psychology. If you feel that you don't need a summary or if you don't want a summary, then feel free to skip ahead to the next lecture. Otherwise, let's get started with the summary. In the first section, I showed you the building blocks of our memory and first I showed you the distinction between working memory and long term memory. And the working memory is basically the active part of our memory is where we think it's where we are conscious. An hour long term memory is this gigantic library of information that we stole all the knowledge that we know until we need it. And then we put it back into our working memory and putting knowledge from our working memory to long term memory is calling coding and putting it back from our long term memory into our working memory is called retrieval. And then I showed you that if people are unable to retrieve memories from the long term memory than that leads to retrograde amnesia, we forget everything that happened in the past. Whereas if we're unable to encode information, if we're unable to send information from our working memory to our long term memory, then we have interrogate amnesia, which means that we can store any new information. Then we zoom further into hour long term memory and so that they're different types of memories in our long term memory. First, there's declarative memory, which is about facts. And second, there's procedural memory, which is about our skills and declarative memory can be further split up into episodic memory, which is the knowledge of what happened to us in the past. It's basically our internal diary. One semantic memory is about general knowledge, such as how many lacks of dog has or the color of the sky, and basically all the general things you know about the world. Then we moved into the second section and looked at how our brain actually retrieves memories from our long term memory, and specifically we talked about associations which create retrieval paths that lead us to the correct memories, and those are necessary to find information an hour long term memory. Then I showed you the main reasons why we forget one. Is that information DK's over time? But a much more important reason is that we are often unable to find the information an hour long term memory and finally, another reasons why we forget things. This interference because the more information we store, the more likely it is that we get let the wrong way when we're trying to retrieve the information. Then I showed you the different retrieval types, which are familiarity and recollection of similarity is basically this feeling that I know that I know this, but I haven't really found it in my memory. It's for example, I know that I know this person, but I don't really know who it ISS and family clarity can sometimes be misplaced, such as, for example, in witness testimony where people think that they have seen a person committing a crime. But in reality they just feel that this person is familiar because they've seen that person somewhere else. Then I showed you the similarity problem, which is that our memory confuse things if there are too similar. And in the case of witness testimony, that can mean that a witness things that a person is the culprit of a crime just because that person looks similar to the actual culprit. Then I showed you what happened. If our brains succeeds in finding the correct memories, and I showed you that even in that case, the memory we have may not match the actual event anymore because our brain added sour memories and it fills in gaps. Then I showed you the main mechanism by which our brain reconstructs memories, which are scheme us. Our brain uses general knowledge to fill in gaps in our memories, and it's safe storage space by not saving every information again and again. But if information repeats itself, it just stores that once in a schema and then gets the information from the schema. If it's missing in our episodic memory, then we looked at encoding. What happens if we try to learn new memories and I showed you that there are a number of factors that make encoding more effective, such as rehearsal, repeat things again and again and again or chunking chunk information together to make it more digestible for your brain. Another thing that helps is deep processing. Try to go as deep as possible into the meaning of something. Try to find examples from everyday life. Try to find analogies with your everyday life to create retrieval paths so that your later able to remember the memory. Another thing that houses using images and making things emotional because that essentially tax things as important to our brain and makes it more likely that we remember them later. Finally, an important thing to do is to prepare retrieval accused for yourself. If you have a good retrieval cue that reminds you off the memory that you want to retrieve later, it gets much more likely that you will be able to retrieve this. And that's essentially everything we've covered about memory in this course so far. Now what I want to do in the next lecture is zoom out and look how memory relates to other topics and psychology because I don't just want to help you to understand memory, but I want to help you to understand the mine in general, and for that you need to understand how our memory relates to other topics and psychology 17. The bigger picture: in this section. I want to zoom out with you and show you how the things you learned about memory in this course relate to other topics and psychology is that it can all grow together and so that he can get a general understanding off how the human mind works. And right at the beginning, we will zoom out very far to the society level and have a look at a major problem that we're facing their, which are stereotypes. Stereotypes are believes that people hold about social groups and social groups can be any kind of group such as men and women, or it can be based on nationality is that can be Moroccans forces Turkish versions German, for example. It can be based on occupation. It can be the professor of the construction worker and about all these groups we have believes, and these beliefs are called stereotypes, and Syria types are a huge problem because the influence people and create unfairness in the world. For example, people tend to have the stereotype that woman are not suited for leadership positions. In the worst case, there's the stereotype of a blonde woman who is now the most intelligent. And although most of us know that such stereotypes aren't really true, they still influence us unconsciously. And we can see that, for example, in the fact that women tend to receive a lower salary than men and they also tend to be at lower positions, they tend to be less likely to hold leadership positions. And the question is, now, why does that happen? Why does the brain use Syria types? Why can't it just treat every person as an individual and not see man and women but Mary and Peter? And the answer has to do with what I told you about scheme us. I told you before that one of the biggest problems of our memory is that it gets cluttered in information, which makes it hard to retrieve information and to prevent that. It doesn't store everything again and again. But if information repeats itself, it just stores that in a schemer and the Syria tap is one type of schema. It's a scheme about a group of people. So essentially, if we see a woman and then another woman and then another woman and another woman, then to the brain, that is repetition off information because they are all women. And so what the brain does is it creates a schema just for this group of people. And the problem is that it's not just our life experiences that count for that, but also the things we see in the media. For example, characters we see in a comedy movie or a TV show. All of these things influence what's in our schema off women or other social groups. And then, during the reconstruction face, are being uses that schemer, that stereotype to reconstruct what happened in the past. And then what happens is people misremember things just like in the experiment that I showed you with the speed off the car where people remember the speed as either faster or slower people came this. Remember, for example, the performance off the female employees. The question is, now, what do you do about that? And now that you know how memory works, you may see that it isn't as easy as just telling people to stop using Syria types because they can't. That's literally how their memory works. That's how their brain works. And they actually studies that have attempted this, to tell people hate people tend to be influenced by stereotypes. Be aware of this and try not to do it. And what happens is that it backfires. People actually get less accurate in their memory if they refrain from stereotypes, because stereotypes are something that is necessary for the memory to remember stuff. So that's one relationship between memory and other topics. Um, psychology, schemers and memories are basically stereotypes, and they influence what's going on at the societal level. Okay, let's have a look at another example. Let's have a look at depression and, well, let's actually start with people who are not depressed. What do people do who are not depressed? But what they usually do is that when something great happens, say they win in the competition, then they think back to this very often. They rehearse it basically, and because most people rehearse positive things and don't rehearse so much negative things , because it's not nice to think about negative things, they're positive. Memories tend to be stronger. Then they're negative memories. Just think about the saying that in the past everything used to be better. That's probably not true. That's probably because we must remember the past because we have rehearsed positive things and not so much negative things. OK, but what happens in a depressed person and well, very often is exactly the opposite. So the depressed person will think about negative things. If the person, for example, fails at a competition, then that depressed person is likely to think, Ah, why, how could I? I'm such a loser and think back to it again and again and again and rehearse the negative at the same time. Depressed people are also much less likely to rehearse. The positive they may think that are. I just want by luck or it wasn't that impressive anyways. It was a stupid competition, and as a result they will not think back to it very often. And then as a result, what happens is that they strengthened the negative memories and weaken the positive memories so that their memory off the world is a very negative one. So even things as simple as rehearsal can play a big role in our life. All right, let's talk about another example where we can apply our knowledge of memory, and the topic of chosen is repressed memories. Ever heard of this idea that we repress memories, we basically push them into the unconscious and that that causes psychological problems. Well, there's a very old theory, and that's basically help psychotherapy started. They started with the theory that people repressed memories and once that repress these memories, once they push them into unconscious, that can cause problems. And then what you need to do is basically recover the memories so that the person can heal from it. So to say and so up psychotherapist did at the time is they were digging a lot into the memories off another person and trying to recover that hit a memory that is somewhere repressed there. And sometimes it happened that the patients suddenly remembered a memory that was seemingly lost before, for example, that the patient was raped as a child or abused in any way generally some traumatic memory that you would like to forget, and that may have been repressed. However, in some cases, it turned out that these men was actually not that likely to be true if they're not completely impossible. And I just think back to the lecture where I told you about all these planted memories in the history of memory research. Memory researchers have shown that it's extremely easy to plant relatively complex memories in another person. And if a researcher can plan the memory within a couple of hours, or at least within a couple of sessions, then imagine what is possible if you have psychotherapy for, say, a couple of years. And this has brought a rapid turn and how people think about psychological problems and whether they really do to repress memories. And in any case where there's really wise to dig into the mind of another person to find these memories, because what you might be doing, in the end, is not finding a lost memory but fabricating a fake memory. Okay, when he is one more example to illustrate to you why memory is such an important topic for understanding how our mind works. And that example has to do with delusions and illusions are basically falls, believes about the world. It's when you believe things that aren't necessarily true, such as that God commanded you to do something, or that the world is controlled by aliens and there are actually people who believe such things, and those are called delusions, and that's very hard to explain if you believe that our memories something passive if it just stores information about the world. But we have seen that memory is something very active where the things we'll remember have been edited by our brain. And actually, if you really look at it closely, then basically when we have learned, is that everybody is delusional. To some degree, everybody has believes about the world that aren't true. Everybody has memories about the world that aren't true. Just look at witness testimony and the dramatic things that come out there. So what I'm trying to show you is that the difference between the delusional personal beliefs of the world is controlled by aliens and a normal person is actually not as big as we tend to think of it. And it's not so much that something fundamentally different is going on in the mind of the deluded person. But it may actually be that the deluded person is just doing mawr off what a normal person does. So there may be more editing going on in our brain, and as a result, memories get more twisted, more inaccurate and more crazy. So overall memory plays a huge role in our life. As I said at the beginning, memories are world, and it starts already from the very simple processes such as reversal. And it goes all the way to the more complex processes, such as reconstruction of memories and inventing memories that didn't actually happen. 18. Conclusion: Hey, congratulations on finishing this course. I hope you get a lot of value out of it. I certainly try to put a lot of useful material into it. And if they're still things that are unclear or other things that you want to ask them, don't forget that there's also the Q and A section in which you can ask questions any time , and I will do my best to answer them as quickly as possible. Also, please don't forget to leave a rating for this course. And if you do nothing that this course is worthy or five stars, then please let me know what I can improve. All right, thank you for the time and effort you put into this course and let me know if I can help you with anything.