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T h e M e m o r y K e y
<http://www.memory-key.com>

Your resource for information about memory and memory improvement

March 2008

<http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_118.htm>

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THIS MONTH ON MEMORY-KEY.COM:

TWO COGNITIVE SYSTEMS THAT OPPOSE & COMPLEMENT

QUIRKY ASPECTS OF CONTEXT

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NEW: The original Memory Key is now available as an e-book!
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TWO COGNITIVE SYSTEMS THAT OPPOSE & COMPLEMENT

This month I want to return to fundamentals — one of the foundations of how our minds work. I’ve spoken before of the importance of context for memory (http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_100.htm#CONTEXT), how expectations shape our cognitive abilities (http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_77.htm#EXPECTATIONS ), and the role of schemas in expert knowledge (http://www.memory-key.com/StudySkills/expertise.htm). What I’m going to talk about shows how all those tie together, and far more besides, such as: why habits are so hard to break and have such a powerful effect; why we get more set in our ways as we age, and find it harder to deal with information that doesn’t mesh with what we already think we know; why we often can only call up very limited information about someone we’ve met; why prejudice is so common; why eyewitness testimony is so unreliable.

Life is complicated. It always has been (though it’s got much worse!). But even back in the days of our distant hunting and gathering ancestors, life was complicated enough. To deal with it, we evolved a complex and very flexible brain, which developed two complementary skills that built on the basic need of all animals: to know what to ignore and what to react to, and how to react to it.

So what are these skills? The first is the development through experience of mental models, scripts, schemas, call them what you will, the essence is that you have a mental representation which tells you what to expect from a given situation. This means we don’t have to think too hard when we come up against a familiar situation (and I’m using the word situation in a very broad sense here). What enables us to develop these models is our basic tendency to look for those features that seem to re-occur in different instances of that situation. It’s the same thing we use to develop concepts, such as ‘dog’ and ‘fruit’ etc.

Now representations such as these, once they’ve been developed and ‘filed’, as it were, are very resistant to change. They need to be, because, remember, their purpose is to relieve you of the heavy work — if you keep refining your model every time you come across a new instance, you’re not getting the benefit, which is to reduce your cognitive load.

But of course there’s a downside. Sometimes new things happen. We need to be responsive to unexpected information. The human brain being adaptive is, after all, what we pride ourselves on.

So what we have is these two systems, and research indicates that these are based in two different parts of the brain. Our general beliefs about the world, our mental models, is a slow-learning system located in the neo-cortex (the ‘new’ part of our brain, evolutionarily speaking). But the part that learns fast, that responds to new and surprising events, is located in our old friend the hippocampus (which is in one of the oldest parts of the brain). Another way you can think of it is that the neocortex holds semantic memory (our knowledge of facts and language etc), while the hippocampus is where episodic (event) memory is processed.

The point is that anything that happens to you, that you experience, comes into the hippocampus (which is why my memory news reports so often mention it), but they won’t necessarily affect the ‘permanent’ memory held in your neocortex. To move on to that desired state, the information needs to be activated repeatedly. If that happens, it is consolidated (see http://www.memory-key.com/NatureofMemory/consolidation.htm), and becomes part of permanent memory.

A brief example of this is people stereotypes. We have all developed, in childhood, social categories that we use when first meeting a person. Categories such as gender, race, and age. We categorize people on these bases automatically for the most part, and these categories throw up a whole raft of information that we hold in our neocortical system. If we don’t have much time, or much interest, we may stop there, and not make any effort to perceive (and thus remember) the person as an individual (which is why eyewitness testimony can be so unreliable). But if the person behaves in a way that is inconsistent with our mental model of how a person ‘like that’ behaves, then that’s new information, and may, if reinforced (remember, we need repeated activation — which can simply involve you thinking about it), be consolidated and passed on to permanent storage, where it may modify your mental model.

This basic process has a whole lot of consequences for how we perceive and judge and remember, but I’ll leave you to reflect on that.
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QUIRKY ASPECTS OF CONTEXT

Recently there’s been reported a few rather quirky studies that demonstrate different aspects of context affecting behavior.

The first is a finding that a person working on a different task within your field of vision slows you down. This is a consequence of those mirror neurons we’ve heard so much about in the past couple of years: when we see someone doing something, we automatically imagine ourselves doing it. (For more, see the press release at http://www.physorg.com/news122733786.html)

The second finding was that when people are in a group where information is totally shared, the best solutions to a problem aren’t necessarily found, because the first ‘best’ solution will stunt the development of others. ( http://www.physorg.com/news122709617.html)

And finally, here’s a behavior that’s affected by the context inside you, rather than by other people. We often make decisions about what to do based on our predictions of how much we’ll enjoy them. But it turns out we’re not all that good at making these predictions. This is because we base our predictions on a comparison of the alternatives. But when it comes to the actual experience, we’re mostly too busy having the experience to think about the alternatives, so that doesn’t actually affect our enjoyment of the experience. However, if we deliberately take the time during the experience to think about what we could be doing instead, then it’s more likely to match our prediction. As the researcher says: "We think we will be thinking about the roads not taken, but the fact is that whatever road we choose in life requires that we navigate it, and doing so limits our ability to compare that road to its alternatives. Life's untaken roads come to mind much less often than we expect them to." (http://www.physorg.com/news122478943.html)  

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The Memory Key website is named after my book "The Memory Key", a
practical user-friendly handbook designed to help people achieve
genuine, long-lasting memory improvement.

http://www.memory-key.com/AboutTheSite/about_book.htm

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