Memory Essays (1672 words) - Neuroscience, Psychiatry,

Memory Kristine Thornton Southern Technical College Dr. Andrea Goldstein You never forget how to ride a bicycle - and now a University of Aberdeen led team of neuroscientists has discovered why. Their research, published this month in Nature Neuroscience, has identified a key nerve cell in the brain that controls the formation of memories for motor skills such as riding a bicycle, skiing or eating with chop sticks. When one acquires a new skill like riding a bicycle, the cerebellum is the part of the brain needed to learn the coordinated movement. The research team, which includes scientists from the Universities of Aberdeen, Rotterdam, London, Turin and New York, has been working to understand the connections between nerve cells in the cerebellum that enable learning. They discovered that one particular type of nerve cell -the so called molecular layer interneuron - acts as a "gatekeeper", controlling the electrical signals that leave the cerebellum. Molecular layer interneurons transform the electrical signals into a language that can be laid down as a memory in other parts of the brain. Dr . Peer Wulff , who led the research in Aberdeen together with Prof. Bill Wisden at the University's Institute of Medical Sciences, said: "What we were interested in was finding out how memories are encoded in the brain. We found that there is a cell which structures the signal output from the cerebellum into a particular code that is engraved as memory for a newly learned motor skill ( Staff, S. X. (2009, July 17). Scientists discover why we never forget how to ride a bicycle. Retrieved October 18, 2016, from http://medicalxpress.com/news/2009-07-scientists-bicycle.html) ." One advertising strategy is to target consumers with promotions that capitalize on social identity. The idea is that you will prefer a product that is pitched to your identity. No doubt you have seen the TV ads on reverse mortgages, where a clearly older celebrity makes the pitch. You are supposed to be persuaded by the ad because you can identify with such a person. He's a senior, you're a senior. He's a star, and you can imagine how great it might feel if you were one. In other words, your personal identity is wrapped up in how responsive you are to a given ad. This same principle is at work in ads that use beautiful models to sell clothes and star athletes to sell athletic gear. Social identity can be threatened when the ad presents events, information, or choices in a way that is inconsistent or negative. A senior, for example, would not be persuaded to consider reverse mortgages if the salesman was a young and gorgeous female model. Recent studies show t hese kinds of cognitive disconnect interfere with how consumers encode and remember advertising messages. Advertisers certainly don't want to create identity-threat ads because consumers will be automatica lly motivated to forget the ads ( Klemm , W. R., PhD. (2014, February 21). How Advertisers Get You to Remember Ads | Psychology Today. Retrieved October 22, 2016, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201402/how-advertisers-get-you-remember-ads ). Science tells us not to rely on eyewitness accounts. Eyewitness memory is fickle, and all too often, shockingly inaccurate. In 1984 Kirk Bloodsworth was convicted of the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl and sentenced to the gas chamberan outcome that rested largely on the testimony of five eyewitnesses. After Bloodsworth served nine years in prison, DNA testing proved him to be innocent. Such devastating mistakes by eyewitnesses are not rare, according to a report by the Innocence Project, an organization affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University that uses DNA testing to exonerate those wrongfully convicted of crimes. The uncritical acceptance of eyewitness accounts may stem from a popular misconception of how memory works. Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. On the contrary, psychologists have found that me mories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them. The act of remembering, says eminent memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, is "more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video