MetaFilter posts tagged with memory

Pay phone time machine

spamandkimchi — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:30:30 -0800

Recalling 1993 lets you "Step back twenty years into New York City's past. Call from any NYC pay phone to hear what was happening on that block in 1993." Other notable public history projects include the History Pin app and Shimon Attie's installations in Berlin and Rome.

Central Station

homunculus — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:34:26 -0800

The Smell of Orange Groves. This short story by Lavie Tidhar (author of Osama: A Novel) is part of his Central Station story cycle, taking place in or around Tel Aviv’s Central Station neighborhood sometime in the future. Here are a few more free Central Station stories: Crabapple The Lord of Discarded Things Strigoi

"As the hymn says, you can lay your burden down."

zarq — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 07:36:49 -0800

The Things They Leave Behind. "When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened 30 years ago, something unexpected happened: People started leaving things at the wall. One veteran has spent decades cataloging the letters, mementos, and other artifacts of loss — all 400,000 of them." (Via.) Website: The National Park Service Museum Resource Center. CSPAN Video: "Bob Sonderman, director of the Museum Resource Center, gave a tour of the football field-sized warehouse which houses roughly 2.5 million archaeological objects from National Park locations in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia." (2/11)

People full of shit, both liberal and conservative, most of the time.

Blasdelb — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 07:17:26 -0800

False memories of fabricated political events [ABSTRACT]. In the largest false memory study to date, 5,269 participants were asked about their memories for three true and one of five fabricated political events. Each fabricated event was accompanied by a photographic image purportedly depicting that event. Approximately half the participants falsely remembered that the false event happened, with 27% remembering that they saw the events happen on the news. Political orientation appeared to influence the formation of false memories, with conservatives more likely to falsely remember seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran, and liberals more likely to remember George W. Bush vacationing with a baseball celebrity during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. A follow-up study supported the explanation that events are more easily implanted in memory when they are congruent with a person's preexisting attitudes and evaluations, in part because attitude-congruent false events promote feelings of recognition and familiarity, which in turn interfere with source attributions. [FULL TEXT PDF AVAILABLE HERE]

► Over 5,000 subjects were asked if they remembered fabricated political events. ► About half of the sample showed evidence of memory distortion. ► Political preferences appeared to guide the formation of false memories. ► Suggestions that are congruent with prior attitudes and evaluations can produce feelings of familiarity and recognition. ► These can in turn bias source judgments, leading to false memories.

In May of 2010, Slate.com invited its readers to complete a survey about their perspectives on various political events. Those who volunteered read about five unrelated news events with accompanying photographs and were asked about their memories for them. Unbeknownst to the respondents, one of the five events they were asked about was a complete fabrication; it never happened at all. In effect, Slate readers became participants in the largest false memory experiment ever conducted. The survey was posted in the weeks leading up to the publication of Slate's article on research into false memories (Saletan, 2010). Indeed, the idea that Slate's readers might come to remember whole events that never occurred is based on a voluminous literature suggesting just that. Since the mid-1990s, researchers have investigated the ways in which people come to have vividly detailed, emotionally laden memories of entirely false events—what are known as “rich false memories” (see Loftus & Bernstein, 2005). Today, we know quite a lot about the situations that can give rise to rich false memories. A central feature of the memory implantation experiments is the use of highly credible suggestive information. In several early studies (e.g., Hyman and Billings, 1998, Hyman et al., 1995 and Loftus and Pickrell, 1995 [FULL TEXT]), researchers obtained true childhood events from familial informants and asked participants to work at remembering them. A false event invented by the experimenters (with help from the family member) was embedded among the true events, often leading more than a quarter of participants to report false memories. Researchers in another unique study recruited a well-known psychologist and radio personality to help implant false childhood memories in subjects using bogus dream interpretations (Mazzoni, Lombardo, Malvagia, & Loftus, 1999). More recently, a number of studies (e.g., Bernstein et al., 2005 and Sharman and Calacouris, 2010) have led participants to believe that a computer algorithm could, based on their responses to a battery of personality questionnaires, generate a personalized list of “likely” childhood events. Participants were then asked to try to remember events from the list, which consisted mostly of true events drawn from their earlier reports—plus one critical false event. While these studies involved diverse methodologies, they all made use of suggestions that appeared to come from a trusted, or expert source. See also,

The Formation of False Memories [FULL TEXT] For most of this century, experimental psychologists have been interested in how and why memory fails. As Greene2 has aptly noted, memories do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they continually disrupt each other, through a mechanism that we call "interference." Literally thousands of studies have documented how our memories can be disrupted by things that we experienced earlier (proactive interference) or things that we experienced later (retroactive interference). Relatively modern research on interference theory has focused primarily on retroactive interference effects. After receipt of new information that is misleading in some way, people make errors when they report what they saw3. The new, post-event information often becomes incorporated into the recollection, supplementing or altering it, sometimes in dramatic ways. New information invades us, like a Trojan horse, precisely because we do not detect its influence. Understanding how we become tricked by revised data about a witnessed event is a central goal of this research. The paradigm for this research is simple. Participants first witness a complex event, such as a simulated violent crime or an automobile accident. Subsequently, half the participants receive new misleading information about the event. The other half do not get any misinformation. Finally, all participants attempt to recall the original event. In a typical example of a study using this paradigm, participants saw a video depicting a killing in a crowded town square. They then received written information about the killing, but some people were misled about what they saw. A critical blue vehicle, for instance, was referred to as being white. When later asked about their memory for the color of the vehicle, those given the phony information tended to adopt it as their memory; they said they saw white4. In these and many other experiments, people who had not received the phony information had much more accurate memories. In some experiments the deficits in memory performance following receipt of misinformation have been dramatic, with performance differences as large as 30 or 40%. This degree of distorted reporting has been found in scores of studies, involving a wide variety of materials. People have recalled nonexistent broken glass and tape recorders, a clean-shaven man as having a mustache, straight hair as curly, stop signs as yield signs, hammers as screwdrivers, and even something as large and conspicuous as a barn in a bucolic scene that contained no buildings at all. In short, misleading post-event information can alter a person's recollection in a powerful ways, even leading to the creation of false memories of objects that never in fact existed. False beliefs about fattening foods can have healthy consequences [FULL TEXT] We suggested to 228 subjects in two experiments that, as children, they had had negative experiences with a fattening food. An additional 107 subjects received no such suggestion and served as controls. In Experiment 1, a minority of subjects came to believe that they had felt ill after eating strawberry ice cream as children, and these subjects were more likely to indicate not wanting to eat strawberry ice cream now. In contrast, we were unable to obtain these effects when the critical item was a more commonly eaten treat (chocolate chip cookie). In Experiment 2, we replicated and extended the strawberry ice cream results. Two different ways of processing the false suggestion succeeded in planting the false belief and producing avoidance of the food. These findings show that it is possible to convince people that, as children, they experienced a negative event involving a fattening food and that this false belief results in avoidance of that food in adulthood. More broadly, these results indicate that we can, through suggestion, manipulate nutritional selection and possibly even improve health.

Some of the biggest names in the art world have reportedly been fooled by a biography of a fake artist created by the author William Boyd and the rock star David Bowie. Last week the glitterati of New York gathered for a launch party of Boyd's biography of the apparently rediscovered American painter Nat Tate. Bowie, a director of 21 Publishing, the company which produced the book, read extracts to the gathering. Critics on the other side of the Atlantic were due to attend the British launch of the memoir on Tuesday. Several British papers, including the Sunday Telegraph, have already run extracts from the book. Excerpts were also published on Bowie's own website. (Previously)

Speak, Memory

parudox — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 19:39:34 -0800

A meditation on falsehood and truth in memory by Oliver Sacks.

"We want you to take a picture."

zarq — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 12:00:02 -0800

This iconic photo of the first Aboriginal woman to enlist in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps was used as a recruitment tool, and "appeared all over the British Empire [in 1942] to show the power of the colonies fighting for King and country." Its original caption in the Canadian War Museum read, "Unidentified Indian princess getting blessing from her chief and father to go fight in the war." Its current caption in The Library and Archives of Canada reads: "Mary Greyeyes being blessed by her native Chief prior to leaving for service in the CWAC, 1942." But as it turns out, the two people in the photo had never met before that day. They weren't from the same tribe or even related and Private Mary Greyeyes was not an "Indian Princess." 70 years after the photo was taken, her daughter-in-law Melanie made sure the official record was corrected. Via The Department of National Defense shows the photo on their website with the following caption: Private Mary Greyeyes, Cree from Muskeg Lake, Cree Nation, Canadian Women's Army Corps. Library and Archives Canada (PA-129070) In 1946, Mary shipped back to Canada and was discharged. She returned to the Muskeg Lake reserve. One day, during a federal election, her old sergeant and a couple of Mounties showed up. They said, “Mary, you’ve got to come and vote.” The deal was, Indians who had served in the war could vote, if they gave up their treaty rights:
So Mary says to them, she says, “Can my mom vote?” And they said, “No, she didn’t fight in the war.” She said, “Well, what about my cousins over there, can they vote?” And they said no. They said, “C’mon Mary, you gotta come, we’ve got the photographer.” And she said, “All those years, I said nothing. Now I’m saying no.”
And that’s the real story of Mary Greyeyes.

SPAUN of the living

kliuless — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 06:09:00 -0800

The simulated brain - "First computer model to produce complex behaviour performs almost as well as humans at simple number tasks." [1,2,3,4,5,etc.]

"a homeless consciousness"

Kattullus — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 17:28:34 -0800

Susannah Cahalan has a month-long gap in her memory from when she was struck by the little known disease anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. Cahalan, a New York Post journalist, wrote an account of her ordeal shortly after it happened, and went on the Today Show to talk about it. Now she has written a book on her experience called Brain on Fire and wants to make people aware of the disease, and that was the subject of a follow-up segment on the Today Show. She is not the only person to have been afflicted. There is more information about the disease and the book on Cahalan's website. She was interviewed at length on NPR's Fresh Air earlier this month. Novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison has a well-written review of Brain on Fire and puts it in its literary context.

"Many of the great political crimes of recent history were committed in the name of memory."

the man of twists and turns — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 04:50:17 -0800

Telling Stories About The Stories We Tell, An Interview with Philip Gourevitch

But what really interests me ultimately is not to record the past, so much as how people live with the past and get on with it. There’s a kind of fetishization of memory in our culture. Some of it comes from the experience and the memorial culture of the Holocaust—the injunction to remember. And it also comes from the strange collision of Freud and human rights thinking—the belief that anything that is not exposed and addressed and dealt with is festering and going to come back to destroy you. This is obviously not true. Memory is not such a cure-all. On the contrary, many of the great political crimes of recent history were committed in large part in the name of memory. The difference between memory and grudge is not always clean. Memories can hold you back, they can be a terrible burden, even an illness. Yes, memory—hallowed memory—can be a kind of disease. That’s one of the reasons that in every culture we have memorial structures and memorial days, whether for personal grief or for collective historical traumas. Because you need to get on with life the rest of the time and not feel the past too badly. I’m not talking about letting memory go. The thing is to contain memory, and then, on those days, or in those places, you can turn on the tap and really touch and feel it. The idea is not oblivion or even denial of memory. It’s about not poisoning ourselves with memory."

Philip Gourevitch (previously) is the author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which "chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. " He has been interviewed by, among others, The Browser, The Economist, and PBS's Frontline.

Sodium memorial

Blazecock Pileon — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 05:23:50 -0800

Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto

The Drowned World

Artw — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 10:32:46 -0800

J.G. Ballard and the alchemy of memory

Debunking the Myth of Intuition

vidur — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 19:54:48 -0800

"Can doctors and investment advisers be trusted? And do we live more for experiences or memories? In a SPIEGEL interview, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman discusses the innate weakness of human thought, deceptive memories and the misleading power of intuition."

"Well, I guess Cab Calloway was my number one."

gilrain — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:25:06 -0800

Alive Inside is an upcoming documentary exploring how listening to music can briefly return memories to patients who previously seemed completely lost to Alzheimer's. An excerpt can be seen here.

An Absence Present

Miko — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:42:57 -0800

The Titanic Guide to New York City. An exploration of traces of the disaster, revealing history still written on the landscape.

fuggedaboudit

Obscure Reference — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 06:15:49 -0800

The forgetting pill: Can it erase painful memories forever? What about politically inconvenient memories? Will the act of remembering will become a choice?

Human GPS

vidur — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:15:39 -0800

"Piloting London’s distinctive black cabs (taxis to everyone else) is no easy feat. To earn the privilege, drivers have to pass an intense intellectual ordeal, known charmingly as The Knowledge. Ever since 1865, they’ve had to memorise the location of every street within six miles of Charing Cross – all 25,000 of the capital’s arteries, veins and capillaries. They also need to know the locations of 20,000 landmarks – museums, police stations, theatres, clubs, and more – and 320 routes that connect everything up." Acquiring The Knowledge changes the brains of those who acquire it.

"..to get a medallion from a sofa where there's a pterodactyl which pushes a shopping trolley..."

obscurator — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:39:49 -0800

World Memory Champion Ben Pridmore can memorize a deck of playing cards in under 30 seconds. Sometimes he imagines elaborate, on-the-fly tales of absurdity to aid his memorization. One such story was brought to life by DJ Shadow (way previously) and a cast of thousands: Scale It Back (bonus, helpful recall of entire story at end of video)

To The Moon

empath — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:58:05 -0800

To The Moon is a stunningly good game about death, love and memories. If you love games and you enjoy love stories, I highly urge you to download it and play it immediately. Here's a review, but you shouldn't read it. You should just play it. Warning: Have kleenex handy.

seeking sunken ship, shrinks study stories

Twang — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:35:31 -0800

Two Aussie psychologists studied the 66-year-old testimony of 70 German sailors rescued after their boat sank. The ship which sank it, the HMAS Sydney, also sank ... taking 645 sailors with it.
After analyzing the stories the shrinks - knowledgeable in the vagaries of storytelling - found that the Germans weren't lying. They crowdsourced the stories, sat down together with a map of the Indian Ocean and ...

"My dead migrant has fingerprints, but nobody claims her. I claim her; she is mine."

zarq — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:18:17 -0800

A year ago this August, 72 migrant workers -- 58 men and 14 women -- 'were on their way to the US border when they were murdered by a drug gang at a ranch in northern Mexico, in circumstances that remain unexplained. Since then, a group of Mexican journalists and writers have created' a "Day of the Dead-style Virtual Altar" Spanish-language website, 72migrantes.com, to commemorate each of the victims, some of whom have never been identified. The New York Review of Books has English translations of five of their profiles. "At 72 Migrantes, you can listen to music for the dead (click ‘descargar canciones’), leave a rose icon (click ‘dejar una rosa’), and share food with living migrants by making a donation (click ‘donaciones’). Donations are sent directly to Father Alejandro Solalinde of Hermanos en el Camino, a church organization that provides food, shelter and support to migrants and those who have been kidnapped or threatened by drug and human traffickers in Mexico. The centerpiece of 72 Migrantes is a collection of narratives and photographs, one for each of the victims. The authors (among them Elena Poniatowska, Jorge Volpi, and Juan Villoro) have written the stories of the dead by seeking information about their lives, often from their loved ones. But most families of the migrants have been too afraid to identify themselves publicly. Many of the authors, with little more than a name, have written narratives that fall somewhere between obituary and testimonial. And others have chosen to write the stories of the unidentified by imagining the lives of their subjects."
Google Translate does change the text on the site from Spanish to English.

An Era in Ideas

homunculus — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 21:35:10 -0800

An Era in Ideas. "To mark the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, The Chronicle Review asked a group of influential thinkers to reflect on some of the themes that were raised by those events and to meditate on their meaning, then and now. The result is a portrait of the culture and ideas of a decade born in trauma, but also the beginning of a new century, with all its possibilities and problems." [Via]

Metatalk post in 6 months: Where's that post about how we forget stuff we know is available online somewhere?

cashman — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 14:13:50 -0800

A lot of things make us dumb but for seriously this time you guys, the availability of information on the internet is making us not bother to remember information. We aren't even that great at remembering where the information is that we didn't bother to remember. Instead we just remember that it can be found someplace or other. Article referenced in the ars technica piece (paywall): Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.

When I was six... (or maybe seven)

brundlefly — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:16:59 -0800

Our Blood Stained Roof is a comic by Ryan Andrews. We've seen his work before. Via /r/TrueReddit.

Reinventing Magnetic Core Memory

odinsdream — Thu, 12 May 2011 07:37:09 -0800

Magnetic core memory reborn is a project by Ben North and Oliver Nash implementing 32 bits of core memory using literal tiny core magnets on the Arduino board. The history and operation of core memory is explained and diagrammed. The Arduino has over 4,250 times this amount of memory standard.

Alcohol Helps the Brain Remember, Says New Study

Blake — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 08:25:32 -0800

According to Science Daily a New Study (done on mice) found drinking alcohol primes certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better. When we drink alcohol our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn't stop there. We become more receptive to forming subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations. "Finally, we found that ethanol-treated mice display enhanced place conditioning induced by the psychostimulant cocaine. These data suggest that repeated ethanol experience may promote the formation of drug-associated memories by enhancing synaptic plasticity of NMDARs in dopamine neurons."