Neuroscience
The Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean Hospital is offering:
The Recovered Memory Project: 101 Corroborated Cases of Recovered Memory
- Elsewhere
For when you've had your fill of journal articles... Free access: The last two issues of Wellcome Science mag are packed with psychology, including articles on altruism; the brain and music; and hearing and language in babies. The increasingly bizarre...
- Disturbing Memories Caused By Disturbed Sleep?
Contributed by Lucy Rowe at Totton College. Whether it’s possible for memories of a traumatic experience to be forgotten, only to be recovered years later remains controversial. One concern is that people who report experiencing fragments of buried...
- Continuing-education Program About Memory Functioning
I begin work this week drafting the structure of a multi-hour continuing-education (CE) program that I will be teaching several months from now on the topic of memory functioning for clinicians and clinical researchers. I will be presenting an overview...
- Olfaction, Memory, And Sleep
From today's New York Times: Scent Activates Memory During Sleep, Study Says By BENEDICT CAREY The New York Times Published: March 8, 2007 Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering...
- Scents & Sleep
The New York Times article Study Uncovers Memory Aid: A Scent During Sleep says that smells may help us remember things better. They quote a study recently published in Science: "The smell of roses — delivered to people’s nostrils as they studied...
Neuroscience
The Repressed Memory Challenge
The Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean Hospital is offering:
$1000 award to anyone who can produce a published case of "repressed memory" (in fiction or non-fiction) prior to 1800.From the New York Times:
A Study of Memory Looks at Fact and FictionFor a different view, see:
By BENEDICT CAREY
The beautiful and deeply religious Madame de Tourvel is so distraught after cheating on her husband in the 1782 novel "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" that she blacks out the betrayal altogether, arriving at a convent with no idea of what had brought her there. Soon the horror of the infidelity rushes back, in all its incriminating force.
More than two centuries later, she has become part of a longstanding debate about whether the brain can block access to painful memories, like betrayals and childhood sexual abuse, and suddenly release them later on.
In a paper posted online in the current issue of the journal Psychological Medicine, a team of psychiatrists and literary scholars reports that it could not find a single account of repressed memory, fictional or not, before the year 1800.
The researchers offered a $1,000 reward last March to anyone who could document such a case in a healthy, lucid person. They posted the challenge in newspapers and on 30 Web sites where the topic might be discussed. None of the responses were convincing, the authors wrote, suggesting that repressed memory is a "culture-bound syndrome" and not a natural process of human memory.
The Recovered Memory Project: 101 Corroborated Cases of Recovered Memory
- Elsewhere
For when you've had your fill of journal articles... Free access: The last two issues of Wellcome Science mag are packed with psychology, including articles on altruism; the brain and music; and hearing and language in babies. The increasingly bizarre...
- Disturbing Memories Caused By Disturbed Sleep?
Contributed by Lucy Rowe at Totton College. Whether it’s possible for memories of a traumatic experience to be forgotten, only to be recovered years later remains controversial. One concern is that people who report experiencing fragments of buried...
- Continuing-education Program About Memory Functioning
I begin work this week drafting the structure of a multi-hour continuing-education (CE) program that I will be teaching several months from now on the topic of memory functioning for clinicians and clinical researchers. I will be presenting an overview...
- Olfaction, Memory, And Sleep
From today's New York Times: Scent Activates Memory During Sleep, Study Says By BENEDICT CAREY The New York Times Published: March 8, 2007 Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering...
- Scents & Sleep
The New York Times article Study Uncovers Memory Aid: A Scent During Sleep says that smells may help us remember things better. They quote a study recently published in Science: "The smell of roses — delivered to people’s nostrils as they studied...