summary for 2/28 Monday neuroscience/applied physics session

This week's topic was memory. We tested our short-term memory for items and letters. We talked about different ways to improve our short-term memory, learning concepts like deep encoding (e.g., talking about and touching items as you see them) vs. shallow encoding (e.g., just looking at items without seeing or touching them). We learned about the magic number of 7 +/- 2 (the # of items we can typically hold in our working memory) and experienced first-hand the primacy and recency effects (we tend to remember items at the beginning or end of a list better than items in the middle of a list). 

We also learned about different types of memory, such as explicit memory vs. implicit memory, and episodic memory vs. semantic memory. For instance, a memory of your experience seeing Hamilton is an example of episodic memory (about events and experiences), whereas memorizing lyrics to the Hamilton soundtrack is an example of semantic memory (about facts and concepts). We tested our ability to learn new motor tasks like completing a specific maze and saw our performance improve with repeated exposure to the maze. We also briefly contrasted true memories with false memories.

We ended the session by talking about one of the most famous clinical patients in neuroscience: Patient H.M. I didn't get to show any videos, but here is one that is informative:

Here's an interview with the author of a book on H.M. (who happens to be the grandson of the neurosurgeon involved in H.M.'s lobotomy)

H.M. passed away in 2008, and a digital atlas of his brain is available for free: http://brainandsociety.org/patient-hm/

We ran out of time, but here is a video of another famous patient in the memory world (Clive Wearing): (this is somewhat similar to 50 First Dates, a movie that some people mentioned in the session).

I thought that the students really enjoyed this final session. I hope they got a lot out of these neuroscience sessions!

Cheers,
Lily and Joanna