I'm in love with Scarlett Johansson. Not just the fling of "Lost in Translation" or the attraction of "Under the Skin", but the passionate and complex love of "Vicky Christina Barcelona". My wife tells me that I would have nothing in common with this Hollywood diva, but I'm sure she would give up her fame and fortune for the quiet life with a bald and middle-aged neurologist.
I might just bump into her at an art gallery. Like Jonathan Rhys Meyers did in Woody Allen's 2005 movie "Match Point". In the movie, Nola Rice (Johansson) and Chris Wilton (Meyers) were lovers, but she moved away, and now at this chance meeting he urges her to reconnect.
JRM: Say your phone number.
SJ: What’s the point?
JRM: Just say your phone number.
SJ: Chris…
JRM: Please. Say your phone number.
SJ: O two o seven nine four six o nine nine six.
JRM: I’ll call you.
Johannson delivers the eleven digit phone number fast, fluently and straight-faced. And it seems unlikely that Meyers would remember it, but he does. Maybe because he has a capability for digits. Or maybe because he is highly motivated - as I would be, if I was given Scarlett Johannsons phone number at a chance meeting at an art gallery. Well, most likely he remembers the number for the sake of the narrative in the movie.
The ability to remember independent digits or words is widely used as a measure of short-term memory. The capacity for storing numbers is known as digit-span, and the average digit-span in adults is seven, normally ranging from five to nine.
Short-term memory - or working memory - is temporary. It is fine for limited information you need to use within a minute or so; for instance typing a phone number you’ve just heard, or flipping to the book page you just found in the index. You use this information briefly, and then it disappears.
But Meyers will have to remember the phone number for hours before he can call Johannson. He will have to process the digits, rehearse them and store them in his long-term memory. And later, when he wants to call Johannson, he will have to recall the digits.
Memory is a process of input, rehearsal, storage and recall. This ‘multi-store’ model (The Atkinson-Shiffrin Model) may be simplistic, but it is easily understood, and it will explain most of the mnemonic functions of our daily lives.
A few examples:
I’m not much of a cook, so I usually need a recipe. It will tell me the amount of the specific ingredients, and I will need this input only while adding the ingredients. For my pie crust, the recipe states that I should use three cups of flour, one cup of butter and one egg. I will keep this information in my working memory for a minute or so, but once all the ingredients are in the bowl, and the mixing begins, I will forget all about it. But the kids really love my pies, so I might use that recipe again. Every time I use it, I rehearse the information, and eventually it will be stored in my long-term memory. Now I can recall the ingredients and the amounts for the pie without the input of the printed recipe.
This process of rehearsal, storage and recall works for most of what we need to remember. If highly motivated however, you will not need much rehearsal; for instance, I highly recommend storing the information of your girlfriend’s birthday, the first time she tells you. I did, and it worked out well. On the other hand, remembering our wedding anniversary proved difficult and required a few years of rehearsal (and displeasure on my wife's account), before it was stored in my long-term memory.
When unmotivated, immediate storage is difficult. One of my less helpful abilities is to completely forget the name of someone that I’ve just been introduced to; I might hear his name and keep that input in my working memory for a brief period, but it never makes it more than a few seconds, and it never reaches long-term memory. It’s a struggle, but luckily my wife helps me out and remembers the name of every parent of every child in our son’s school.
The transfer from working memory to long-term memory is critical. When damaged, the ability to learn new information is impaired. This is a common feature in Alzheimer disease and other dementias. Working at a memory clinic, I ask about my patients ability to remember, and I will often learn that “she remembers the past just fine, but she cannot remember what happened yesterday.” In terms of the multi-store model, she can recall events already stored in the long-term memory, but she cannot rehearse or store new information in the long-term memory. This is one of the first signs of dementia; the inability to store (or learn) new information. As disease progresses, recall of earlier events will also be defective.
More pronounced is the loss of storage in Korsakoff psychosis. Described by Russian neuropsychiatrist Sergei Korsakoff in 1887, this is a syndrome associated with the deficiency of the vitamin B1 (thiamine) seen in alcoholism and other disorders of malnutrition. Patients will appear alert and talkative reporting no difficulties, but will have complete anterograde amnesia. In terms of the multi-store model, they will have a preserved working memory of a minute or so, but they completely lack the ability to store input in long-term memory. Immediate recall performed in the working memory is intact, but delayed recall is defective.
I will ask the patient to repeat a seven-item address, and he will do this with no difficulties. I will rehearse the address with him a few times, then ask him to remember it for later recall, and he will agree. But after a few minutes of other tasks, he will have completely forgotten the address and even the instruction that there was an address to remember. Sometimes I will talk to the patient for an hour, then walk out the door and wait in the hallway for a minute or two, then walk back in and ask him if we have met before. He will have no recollection of me as the doctor he just talked to, or even the fact that he had recently talked to a doctor. Sometimes he will present some kind of explanation like “I think we played football together,” illustrating the confabulations that fill out the gaps of his memory. Some patients will give detailed personal information that is correct - but corresponding to an earlier phase of their life. One patient who had been institutionalized for months, told me in details about her job and her apartment from twenty years ago like it was yesterday, lacking all insight that she had lost both job and apartment due to alcoholism. When asked how long she had been living in the nursing home, she replied that she had stayed there for a few days and was planning to go home soon.
In the Korsakoff psychosis, most other cognitive functions will be intact. The patient may perform difficult calculations flawlessly or copy detailed drawings - then minutes later, when noticing the piece of paper, he may ask who did those drawings.
On the other end of the spectrum, memory can be trained to impressive performances. We seem to think of memory in terms of storage of limited capacity, but the opposite might be true. The more knowledge already stored, the easier it is to find something to relate new information to.
One ancient technique is the “method of loci” or “memory journey,” in which items to be remembered are visualized in a familiar environment. In a famous case study by Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, the impressive mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky was presented with long lists of unrelated numbers or words. He would learn these by visualizing them at a familiar road, for instance along his walk to work. One word leaned against a fence, another word underneath a lamp post. Later, when Luria asked him to recall the list of words, he would simply imagine his walk to work, recalling each word along the way. Sometimes he would forget a word if it was placed in the darkness of a doorway or otherwise out of sight. But most words were remembered, sometimes for years.
My own mnemonic functions of storage and recall are average. I walk around art galleries looking for Scarlett Johansson, hoping to pick up her phone number. My wife likes the knickknacks of the museum shops, so I have a lot of time scouting for the actress on my own. I’m sure she will fall for my intellectual charms and my baldness. But my working memory is not as finely tuned as that of Shereshevsky or even Jonathan Rhys Meyers, so I might not be successful in remembering her phone number. I’ll bring a pen.
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Allen W (Director) & Aronson L, Darwin L, Wiley G (Producers): Match Point [Motion picture]. BBC Films. 2005
Gade A: Hjerneprocesser: Kognition og neurovidenskab. Frydenlund Grafisk. 1997
Luria AR: The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory. Harvard University Press. 1987
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