If they were given a drug that blocked protein synthesis, they played happily when the tone went off.Įven more surprising, this lack of conditioned fear response persisted for periods of up to two weeks. Ordinarily, sounding the tone made these rats freeze in fear even when the shock was not applied. Nader's group studied rats trained to remember that a warning tone led to a painful foot shock. "From there, the memory can be stored again, or it can be inactivated." Nader is an assistant professor at NYU. "Memories being remembered go back into a transient, unstable state," he tells WebMD. Frightening memories, at least, can be scattered like dust in the wind. In research published last August in the journal Science, Karim Nader, PhD, and colleagues at New York University (NYU) in New York City found that stored memories are not all carved in stone. How can the brain "reconstruct" old memories? "A gap in memory is often not a bad thing, since it often can be compensated for by reconstruction," he says. But those students reminded of the nutritional information changed the memory of their earlier answers, correcting them to reflect the additional feedback.Īccurate memory of yesterday's beliefs is less important than updating beliefs to reflect new information, Hoffrage explains.
Those students receiving no additional feedback had no change in their memory of their previous answers. Hoffrage's group gave students nutrition information about different foods, asked them questions about that information, and asked them to recall their previous answers a day or a week later. The results were published last year by the American Psychological Association. With his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, Hoffrage studied hindsight bias - that phenomenon that makes us so good at Monday morning quarterbacking. "It is often even good to forget in order not to overload our memories with garbage that we will never need any more." "It is often not necessary for us to be able to remember everything we said, thought, or experienced," psychologist Ulrich Hoffrage, PhD, tells WebMD. Which is not such a bad thing, according to recent research. Two people may have totally different recall of the same event, even if they are lovers reminiscing about their first meeting. Ma- "Ah, yes! I remember it well." You may think you remember it well, but as the old Jay Lerner song so aptly points out, you may be fooling yourself.
0 kommentar(er)
