The Woman Who Can't Forget (19 page)

Autobiographical memory:
A person's memory of the specific events of his or her life as well as for general autobiographical facts, such as where one was born or that one is married.

Biases:
Memory errors in which one's recollection is distorted by present attitudes or information, which break down into five types:

—Consistency bias causes us to make our thoughts and feelings more consistent over time

—Change bias occurs when we think something should have changed and our memory of the way things were earlier is distorted to cause us to perceive change

—Hindsight bias occurs when we think we always knew something that in fact we only just found out

—Stereotypical bias involves attributing qualities perceived to be true of a group onto an individual

—Egocentric bias involves remembering the past in ways that are self-aggrandizing and make ourselves more the center of events than we really were

Childhood amnesia:
The universal human forgetting of almost all of our memories from the first few years of our lives; studies show that long-term autobiographical memory begins at about age four.

Episodic memory:
The memory of specific episodes in one's life; part of long-term, declarative memory. We construct our recollections of the events in our lives from retrieving these episodic memories.

Flashbulb memory:
A memory that is extremely vivid, recalled with an almost photographic degree of detail; most often formed during a major life event of a dramatic or traumatic nature, or a shocking world event, such as when people remember what they were doing when the
Challenger
space shuttle exploded.

Hyperthymestic syndrome:
The name given to autobiographical memory syndrome, the defining features of which are that the person spends an abnormally large amount of time remembering his or her personal past and also has an extraordinary capacity to recall specific events from his or her personal past. The co-occurrence of both defining features must be present. The name is derived from the Greek word
thymesis,
which means “remembering,” and
hyper,
meaning “more than normal.”

Memory bump:
The well-documented increase in recall of autobiographical memories between the ages of approximately ten to thirty; we have many fewer memories from the years both before and after.

Memory inhibition:
The process whereby many memories are inhibited from being stored in long-term memory for future retrieval. One theory argues that this is due to interference from new information coming into our brains. The process is thought to be important in culling out unnecessary or distracting memories.

Method of loci:
A system for memorizing of ancient origin, written about in the Latin text
Rhetorica ad Herennium,
dated to approximately 85
B.C.
Using the method, one envisions a familiar location of some kind, such as a building, and associates pieces of information to be memorized with specific places within that location, as for example parts of a speech being associated with different rooms in a building. When seeking to remember the information, the person “travels” through these locations and the information is more easily recalled.

Misattribution:
A form of incorrect remembering whereby we attribute a memory to the wrong source, such as when an eyewitness mistakes one person's face for another's or when we think we heard about something on TV when in fact a friend told us.

Motivated forgetting:
The process whereby one intentionally pushes memories out of mind; sometimes referred to as purposeful forgetting; studies have shown that the practice is effective in limiting one's recall of those memories over time.

Narrative psychology:
A branch of psychology concerned with how we make meaning out of the experiences of our lives by crafting stories and also by learning stories and listening to others' stories, in other words, the study of the way that stories shape our lives and our sense of self.

Neurobiology:
The study of how neurons are organized into circuitry in our brains and how these circuits process information and affect our behavior.

Neuropsychology:
The study of how the physical structures of the brain relate to psychological processes and symptoms; focuses on identifying areas of strength and of impairment, such as language disorders, cognitive impairments, and memory problems.

Personal event memories:
A subtype of autobiographical memories that are particularly vivid, often highly emotional; usually, memories of dramatic or momentous events.

Repression:
The concept put forward by Sigmund Freud that we force out of consciousness and recollection memories of events, usually ones that are traumatic or anxiety provoking.

Retrieval cue:
A stimulus from the outside world, such as a sound or an image, that triggers our brain to retrieve a memory, such as when a song on the radio brings to mind a particular memory.

Self-defining memory:
A memory to which one attributes particular importance and remembers especially clearly, and repeatedly, about a long-term issue or feature of one's life, which one feels helps to explain who he or she is as a person, usually provoking strong feelings.

Semantic memory:
Our general knowledge of facts about the world, not necessarily specific to our own lives, such as the names of the capital cities of countries and that 1 plus 1 equals 2.

Suggestibility:
The error in memory by which false memories are constructed from outside information, not information stored in our minds, such as notoriously in the case of false memories of child abuse that were created in children's minds.

Superior memory:
Exceptionally strong memory, which may be in many different areas of memory performance, such as memory for long strings of numbers (as, for example, the digits of pi), or for written text. In most superior memory cases on record, no particularly strong recall for autobiographical events has been found.

Transience:
The normal loss of memory for facts and events over time; considered a healthy clearing out of the mind to make way for more important information.

CHAPTER ONE

On AJ's recall of dates and events:
Elizabeth S. Parker, Larry Cahill, and James L. McGaugh, “A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering,”
Neurocase
12 (2006): 35–49.

Background on Alexander Luria and cases S and VP:
John M. Wilding and Elizabeth R. Valentine,
Superior Memory
(New York: Psychology Press, 1997), pp. 22–29.

The Matrix of Numbers:
Exemplary matrix used by Alexander Luria to test his research subject S, as it appears in A. R. Luria,
The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory
(1968; repr., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

Drawings of historical time line and circles for months:
Parker et al., “A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering.”

Background on Endel Tulving's theory of retrieval cues:
“Endel Tulving: World Authority on Human Memory Function,” www.Science.ca.

On involuntary memories, frequency of:
L. Kvavilashvili and G. Mandler. “Out of One's Mind: A Study of Involuntary Semantic Memories,”
Cognitive Psychology
48 (January 2004): 47–94.

On the preponderance of positive memories:
Dorthe Berntsen, “Involuntary Autobiographical Memories,” in John W. Mace (Ed.),
Involuntary Memory
(Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

On the absence of emotion in memories:
Denise R. Beike, “The Unnoticed Absence of Emotion in Autobiographical Memory,”
Social and Personality Psychology Compass,
1:1 (2007): 392–408.

On personal event memories:
David B. Pillemer,
Momentous Events, Vivid Memories
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

CHAPTER TWO

Oliver Sacks:
“The Abyss,”
New Yorker
, September 24, 2007.

On repression of memories:
Matthew Hugh Erdelyi, “The Unified Theory of Repression,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
29 (2006): 499–551.

On memory inhibition:
Michael C. Anderson, “Rethinking Interference Theory: Executive Control and the Mechanisms of Forgetting,”
Journal of Memory and Language
49 (2003): 415–445; Michael C. Anderson,
Active Forgetting
(New York: Haworth Press,2001).

On pushing unwanted memories out of mind:
Benjamin J. Levy and Michael C. Anderson, “Inhibitory Processes and the Control of Memory Retrieval,” By
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
6:7 (July 2002): 299–305.

On motivated forgetting in the long term:
Erdelyi, “The Unified Theory of Repression.”

On Daniel Schacter's memory sins:
Daniel Schacter,
The Seven Sins of Memory
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

On the reconstruction of autobiographical memories:
“The Memory Experience: A Journey of Self Discovery,” bbc.co.uk.

On ruminating and depression:
The work of Susan Nolen-Hoeksema is cited in Bridget Murray Law, “Probing the Depression-Rumination Cycle,”
Monitor on Psychology
, www.apa.org.

On the trade-off of realism in optimism:
Martin Seligman Forum on Depression, Life Matters with Julie McCrossin, August 16, 2002, www.abc.net.

On 3 percent of events memorable:
Avril Thorne, “Personal Memory Telling and Personal Development,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
, 4:1 (2000): 45–56.

CHAPTER THREE

On recall of first memories:
The work of Avril Thorne is described in Carlin Flora, “Self-Portrait in a Skewed Mirror,”
Psychology Today
January–February 2006), 58–62, 64–65.

On memory capability at eighteen months:
Madeline J. Eacott, “Memory for the Events of Early Childhood,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
8:2 (April 1999): 46–48.

On memory of reading before birth:
Mark L. Howe, “Review of The Fate of Early Memories,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
159 (June 2002):1072–1073.

On infants' recognition of self:
Denise Beike et al.,
The Self and Memory
(New York: Psychology Press,2004) p. 48; Stanley B. Klein, Tim P. German, Leda Cosmides, and Rami Gabriel, “A Theory of Autobiographical Memory,”
Social Cognition
22:5 (2004): 460–490.

On age at which long-term memories begin:
Darryl Bruce, Angela Dolan, and Kimberly Phillips-Grant, “On the Transition from Childhood Amnesia to the Recall of Personal Memories,”
Psychological Science
11:5 (September 2000): 360–364.

Overview on theories of child amnesia:
Pirjo Korkiakangas, “Childhood Memories and the Conceptualization of Childhood,”
Ethnologia Scandinavica
24 (1994); Patricia J. Bauer, “Oh Where, Oh Where Have Those Early Memories Gone? A Developmental Perspective on Childhood Amnesia,” Psychological Science Agenda, American Psychological Association, APA Online, www.apa.org.

On mind of infant so different from that of adult:
Henry Gleitman, Alan Fridlund, and Daniel Reisberg,
Psychology
, 6th ed. (New York: Norton, 2004), cited in entry on childhood amnesia, Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood amnesia.

On significance for memory of parents telling stories:
Avril Thorne, “Personal Memory Telling and Personality Development,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review,
4:1 (2000): 45–56.

On when children begin to forget:
Transcript of interview with Harlene Hayne, Science Show, ABC Radio National, June 3, 2006, www.abc.net.

CHAPTER FOUR

On the memory bump and memories vivid:
Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin, “Emotionally Charged Autobiographical Memories Across the Life Span,”
Psychology and Aging
17:4 (2002): 636–652.

On explanations for the memory bump:
Johannes J. F. Schroots and Cor van Dijkum “Autobiographical Memory Bump: A Dynamic Lifespan Model,”
Dynamical Psychology
(2004); Dennis Meredith, “Mining the Meaning of Memories,”
Duke University Alumni Magazine
(March–April 1998), 84, no. 3, 14–18.

On later life memory bumps:
Monisha Pasupathi, “The Social Construction of the Personal Past and Its Implications for Adult Development,”
Psychological Bulletin
127:5 (2001): 651–672.

CHAPTER FIVE

Benedict Carey:
“This Is Your Life (and How to Tell It),”
New York Times,
May 22, 2007.

“Because the life story is…”:
Pasupathi, “The Social Construction of the Personal Past.”

“Our knowledge of self is very…
Stanley B. Klein, Tim P. German, Leda Cosmides, and Rami Gabriel, “A Theory of Autobiographical Memory,”
Social Cognition
22:5 (2004): 460–490.

On when children develop the ability to tell stories:
T. Habermas and C. Paha, “The Development of Coherence in Adolescents' Life Narratives,”
Narrative Inquiry
11:1 (2001): 35–54.

Life story crafted starting in later adolescence:
Pasupathi, “The Social Construction of the Personal Past.” Kate C. McLean et al., “Selves Creating Stories Creating Selves,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
11:3 (2007): 262–278, Kate C. McLean and Michael W. Pratt, “Life's Little (and Big) Lessons,”
Developmental Psychology
42:4 (2006): 714–722.

Repeating stories at rate of 12 percent:
Flora, “Self-Portrait in a Skewed Mirror.”

Negative memories crafted into life wisdom:
Susan Bluck and Judith Gluck, “Making Things Better and Learning a Lesson,”
Journal of Personality
72:3 (June 2004): 543–572.

Memory bump for positive events:
Berntsen and Rubin, “Emotionally Charged Autobiographical Memories”; David Rubin and Dorthe Berntsen, “Life Scripts Help to Maintain Autobiographical Memories of Highly Positive, But Not Highly Negative, Events,”
Memory and Cognition
31:1 (2003): 1–14;W. Richard Walker, John J. Skowronski, and Charles P. Thompson, “Life Is Pleasant—and Memory Helps to Keep It That Way!”
Review of General Psychology
7:2 (2003): 203–218.

On lost selves:
Benedict Carey, “The New Year's Cocktail: Regret with a Dash of Bitters,”
New York Times,
January 1, 2008.

CHAPTER SIX

“As one researcher who has worked…”:
Thomas V. McGovern, “Seeking Socrates' Similes,” PsychTeacher Electronic Discussion List, May 2005, http://teachpsych.org.

“Let's say I'm thinking…”:
Dan McAdams quoted in Flora, “Self-Portrait in a Skewed Mirror.”

On how life narratives change with circumstances:
Dan P. McAdams,
The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live
(New York: Oxford University Press,2006); Dr. Bertram Cohler quoted in Daniel Goleman, “Personal Myths Bring Cohesion to the Chaos of Each Life,”
New York Times
, May 24, 1988; Thorne, “Personal Memory Telling and Personality Development.”

On Erikson's articulation of life's phases:
Leonie Sugarman,
Life-Span Development
(New York: Routledge, 1986).

McAdams's work on life narrative redemptive:
“Flora, Self-Portrait in a Skewed Mirror.”

McAdams on life story as myth:
Daniel McAdams,
The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self
(New York: Morrow, 1993).

“New work by psychological researchers…”:
Goleman, “Personal Myths Bring Cohesion to the Chaos of Each Life.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

On the value of telling others our life stories and sharing memories within families:
Pasupathi, “The Social Construction of the Personal Past.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

On Stroop test:
Stroop Task: A Test of Capacity to Direct Attention, www.snre.umich.edu.

On Proverbs Test:
Robert J. Sbordone,
Neuropsychology for Health Care Professionals and Attorneys
(Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2000).

Table of Easter dates:
Parker et al., “A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering.”

CHAPTER TEN

On traumatic grief:
Shelby Jacobs,
Traumatic Grief: Diagnosis, Treatment and Prevention
(New York: Psychology Press, 1999); “Understanding the Grieving Process,” www.About.com.

“At a wake or memorial service…”:
Daniel Goleman, “Study of Normal Mourning Process Illuminates Grief Gone Awry,”
New York Times
, March 29,1988.

On widows feeling the presence of dead husbands:
Vijai P. Sharma, Ph.D., “One Year After Loss,” www.mindpub.com.

EPILOGUE

“like the difference in size between Shaquille O'Neal…”:
Amy Ellis Nutt, “Picturing the Past: How Science Is Mapping Memory,”
Newark Star-Ledger
, December 10, 2007.