The Lobotomist

The Lobotomist

                Walter Freeman was a neurosurgeon who came up with the term and procedure of lobotomy in 1936. The procedure of the lobotomy involves using a sharp tool to cut some of the connections of the brain (frontal lobe and the thalamus) and was intended to relieve symptoms of a mental illness. At first, Freeman used to anesthetize his patients, making holes either on the top or on the side of the patients’ skull and pierce the brain through those holes. This lead to some complications because the operation was not available to those who really needed it, like those who were in mental hospitals as they had no operating rooms, surgeons, anesthesia, or the necessary tools to perform the surgery and neither the hand the necessary budget. Afterwards, he came up with another type of procedure which involved inserting the sharp tool through the eye orbit of the skull and break a small bone plate to access the brain. This was done in order to simplify the operation and make it simple enough so that even the psychiatrists at the state mental hospitals were able to perform the surgery. In 1946, Freeman carried out this operation on a live patient in order to show how the simple the operation is and that it could be carried out in any place without all the equipment that was required on the first lobotomies.

                At first, this procedure was famous because it was showing the world how symptoms of mental diseases such as schizophrenia, severe depression, bipolar and excessive compulsive disorder decreased after the operation. This encouraged Americans to take relatives or people with any of this mental diseases to Freeman and get the lobotomy; in total, between the mid-1930s and the end of 70s, 40,000 to 50,000 Americans went through the operation with Freeman performing around 3,400 of those lobotomies. The operation relieved feelings of anxiety, emotional tension which leads to hallucinations and dealt with catatonic state. However, afterwards some side effects were seen on the patients such as convulsive seizures, blunting of personality, apathy, irresponsibility, distractibility, childishness, facetiousness, lack of tact, lack of discipline and post-operative incontinence. In 1950, the procedure was banned as doctors in the Soviet Union came with the conclusion that unethical and turned people with mental illnesses’ into idiots.

                Personally, I think the procedure was very unethical because it involved hurting the patient to try and “cure” the mental illness without being certain that the operation will successfully improve the situation. The side effects were disastrous to the patients as some of them were unable to perform simple activities such as cleaning themselves or walk. However, I think that in order to obtain a cure or a way to deal with the diseases. First, somebody has to experiment and mess up a couple of times before they get it right. Freeman probably did not use the most ethical approach but thanks to his research the ways of treating people with mental illnesses has changed and have improved for the better.

http://www.lobotomist.com/interview.htm

IA

French and Richards (1993)

Clock Experiment

Schema Theory, a principle which defines cognitive level of analysis is that “cognitive processes are influenced by social and cultural factors”. Frederic Barltlett came up with the term schema which he defined as a mental representation of knowledge. An experiment he did showed that people had trouble remembering a story from another culture and they reconstructed the story to fit in with their own cultural schemas. With this he showed that memory is not like a recorder but rather when a memory makes sense to them and has meaning they are more likely to remember it. Also, Barlett claims this is why memory is subject to distortions.

            French and Richards (1993) performed an experiment based on this theory. They wanted to investigate if schema theory affected short term memory. Their experiment consisted of having three conditions these were:

• First Condition : In this condition participants were shown a clock with roman numerals and asked to draw the clock from memory
• Second Condition: This condition participants were shown the same clock, except the participants were told before hand that they would have to draw the clock from memory
• Third Condition: Third condition was left with a fullview on the clock and was asked to draw it.

The clock used represented the number four with IIII, not the conventional IV. For the first two conditions the clock was left on the board for 5-6 minutes before it was taken out. In the first two conditions, the majority of participants drew the number four in the conventional IV roman numerals. French and Richards explained this result in terms of schemata knowledge of roman numerials showing how it affects the memory of the participants. These results also show that even though the roman numeral IV was drawn instead of IIII it does not mean that the brain created a false memory but rather used the schema theory to fill in the gaps of knowledge as the conventional IV is better known than the IIII. 

Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer’s disease is a mental deterioration, usually seen in old aged people. So far, there is not a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, there are method to slow it down but the memory loss, confusion and cognitive decline will remain there and continue to develop. Some doctors give advices to try to prevent symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. However, some analysis made by the government claims that there is not enough evidence so far to support the idea of exercising, crossword puzzles and eating habits being ways in which one could prevent the disease.

            So far, not much investigation and money has been put into Alzheimer’s. what some scientists believe, is that eventually, Alzheimer’s disease will be one of the things that will worry Americans as much as cancer or heart diseases. This is due to Americas increase of life rate. This means people are also more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, this concerns Americans as their Alzheimer’s disease and dementia rates increase.

            A phrase that can be linked to memory is that one that says “use it or lost it”. This means that you should use your brain and memory more often in order to avoid gradual age-related mental diseases. Some things doctors have recommended to do are keeping a mind always active, exercise frequently, eating certain foods and consume certain types of vitamins. On the other hand, other experimenters have tried to find the opposing factors (those which will are likely to lead to Alzheimer’s disease) or any other kind of cognitive disease. The results were that those people who smoked, have diabetes, depression, metabolic syndrome or a certain type of gene, have a greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

            Personally, I think that people will try to do whatever they can to avoid the disease. However, there is not a definite way to treat it or prevent it from happening. Hopefully, scientist will be able to develop new ways in which the disease can be treated or ways in which one can prevent the disease more effectively.

Response to the video

Memory is related to breathing because it is a thing we do everyday at every moment of our lives and becaue we don’t know how we remember things.

                What is stored In the brain are not just memories. Those are factors that make up your everyday life. Remembering does not begin straight away. At an early age, childhood amnesia is developed first. It refers to the fact that adults cannot remember what they did when they were 5 years old of before.

                Professor Mark Ho, looks for the key chain that enables memory to begin in children and made an experiment. The test consisted of self recognition, by making the baby realize that he/she is someone as babies are not very aware of their surroundings. Then the mother would put a tissue on the babies nose and will have a mark on their noses. When they were shown a mirror and the babies would see the dirt mark on their noses. Most children would point at the mirror rather than themselves. Only two of the babies who did the experiment were able to realize there was something wrong in their face and noticed the dirt mark on themselves rather than pointing it our in the mirror.

                An image of self is needed before being able to recall one’s own memories. Before we might have memories of events and things but the researchers discuss that they do not have any emotional memories and therefore not meaningful to us unless we have a perception of who we are. 

Some Short-Term Memories Die Suddenly, No Fading

The human brain stores some kinds of memories for a lifetime. But when our eyes are open and looking at things, our gray matter also creates temporary memories that help us process complex tasks during the few seconds these visual memories exist. For decades, scientists have held that such short-term memories don’t suddenly disappear, but grow gradually more imprecise over the course of several seconds.  ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2009) 

According to the quote above, short-term memories gradually fade away. But researchers at the University of California have found that exactly the opposite happens. They did an experiment in which the participants had to retain temporary memories of an object’s colour or retain the shape of the object for four seconds. Afterwards, participants stated that the memories began to “wink out” and they were able to remember the shapes and colours accurately until at some point they suddenly disappeared.

                Another experiment done by Weiwei Chang and Steve Luck at UC Davis Center for mind and Brain. Their experiment consisted of asking 12 adult participants to answer a pair of tests which would separately measure the accuracy of a short-term memory and the probability that the memory still existed or went on to the long-term memory.  The first experiment consisted of flashing three different squares each filled with a different colour. They flashed the image for a tenth of a second  and in intervals of one, four or 10 seconds a wheel showing a spectrum of colours appeared. Afterwards, the three squares would reappear however, uncoloured,  and with one of the squares highlighted. Participants had to recall the colour of the highlighted square and clock the area of the spectrum that looked mostly like the colour they recalled. This process was carried out about 150 times for each of the three memory retention intervals. Results showed that when participants were able to retain a memory of colour they would click a colour very close to the one shown. The distance between the clock and the colour indicated the accuracy of memory. But when the participants were unable to recall the colour they would just click at a random part of the wheel.

                The second test carried out by Chang and Luck was similar to the first one, The only difference was that they used shapes instead of colours. The results were similar to the first one and Luck stated that the participants “either had the memory or did not have it” and the probability of having a memory decreased in a matter of four to ten seconds was very low. Therefore, memories do not gradually fade away. These findings help into the research of memory formation and retention and this would help in everyday life as it will prevent us from making decisions based on weak, inaccurate and unreliable memories.

The Memories You Want To Forget Are The Hardest Ones To Lose

Painful, emotional memories that people would most like to forget may be the toughest to leave behind, especially when memories are created through visual cues, according to a new study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ScienceDaily (Aug. 16, 2007) 

                Keith Payne, an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Science, carried out an experiment which discuss whether emotional memories can be intentionally forgotten like those memories which are not as relevant to our everyday life. Those neutral memories can be from wrong directions, an outdated phone number or the change of a meeting time. It is believed that this intentional forgetting, allows an update on memory for new information to be stored. However, Payne and Elizabeth Corrigan (a graduate psychology student) found that there are emotional events not as strong, like getting a bad grade or having a negative comment from someone could make it complicated to intentionally forget that memory.

                As  Payne and Corrigan explain, when people are intentionally trying to forget information they have to segregate information into what they want to remember and what they don’t want and block off that information they don’t want to retrieve later on. When emotion is involved in a memory, these two factors which help the intentional forgetting of memory are disables as people make connections between their emotional events and their everyday life and because of this, there is a complication when trying to separate the information, hence difficult to forget that memory.

                A few experiments were done prior to this one. However, those studies used emotion-laden words as stimulus such as “death”and “sex”. Whereas, Payne and Corrigan’s experiment asked 218 participants to see a set of pictures and then their expressions were recorded. This was because pictures will have a stronger impact on the participants than the letters used in previous experiments. For instance, the word “murder” could or could not have made the participants feel any fear or negative emotions in them. On the other hand, if a graphic picture of a murder is shown to the participant the effect and emotion will probably be more noticeable and change the way the participants feels.

                The results of the experiment showed that participants could not forget emotional events as easy as those memories which were “ordinary”. Another finding was that both pleasant and unpleasant memories are not easily forgotten intentionally. These findings contribute to see the ways in which emotions confine mental control and answer the question whether intentional forgetting can be helpful when treating painful or traumatic experiences. Findings also show that emotion puts limits on the ability we have to control the contents of our minds. Payne also pointed out that if motivation is powerful enough then intentional forgetting could also be applied to those memories which are strongly connected to emotion. Finally, he pointed out the fact that another experiment might be needed to test the strategies and effectiveness on treatments to voluntarily forget memories. 

The Language Of Emotion: Ad Slogans In Native Tongues Connect To Consumers' Emotions

“In our globalized world, consumers are exposed to marketing messages in many languages. But a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says messages expressed in people's native languages are most effective at triggering emotional reactions.” ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2008)

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            This experiment was carried out in the Netherlands by Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe and Stijn Van Osselaer. Their experiment consisted of studying the effects of different slogans on participants whose 1^st language was different than the one from the slogans (language in the slogans was participants in their 2^nd language). According to their results, in general, when a message is expressed to a consumer, if the message is shown in his native language; the participant is more likely to perceive that message more emotionally than if it was shown in their second language.  

            Researchers believe that these results have nothing to do with the participants skill with the language or the ability to understand an advertisement when hearing it in their second language. However, it was found that the ads that were in the participants first language have an emotional advantage on consumers due to the fact that emotions are also linked with memories, therefore, as researchers believe. When a person is reading or hearing a word, a memory is triggered unconsciously in which that word pays a role. As consumers have more personal experience with their first language, the words they use have more personal memories, hence why a marketing message in a native language is perceived to be more emotional.

            Other findings showed that this effect is more likely to appear in women than in men as women have a stronger emotional memory.  This is a good thing for marketing as they can use this to catch the attention of women and advertise their products. Also, it was found that it did not matter which one was the first language (Frenc h or Ducth). The slogans were always perceived more emotionally in the first language than in the second. A real life application for this would be when trying to make business with a foreign company as if there is someone who speaks and knows the slogans in the first language of the business man then they are more likely to empathize and become eager to make business.