Memory loss treatments discovered

From BBC News:

Mental stimulation and drug treatment could help people with degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's recover their memories, a study says.

Scientists found mice with a similar condition to Alzheimer's were able to regain memories of tasks they had previously been taught.

This is great news for Alzheimer's sufferers. And given that our sense of identity is tied up intimately with our memory, could the following conversation be heard in doctors' surgeries in a few years?

Patient: "Doctor, doctor, I feel like my identity is disappearing, I just can't remember who I am or who anyone else is. Who are you, by the way?"

Doctor: "Don't worry, just take four Identilux daily with a glass of water and you'll be right as rain in no time!"

; )

Self and Identity as Memory

"Self and Identity as Memory", by John F. Kihlstrom, Jennifer S. Beer and Stanley B. Klein of University of California, is a fascinating (albeit densely condensed) survey of philosophical, cognitive and behavioural psychological and neurological research findings that establish the basis of our sense of self and identity in our memory (as the paper's title suggests).

The authors do an admirable job in pulling together myriad strands of narrative (their diverse research sources) into a coherent whole, and there are many intriguing insights along the way—for instance, on the mutually-discrete nature of semantic and episodic memory, and on the possible existence of a separate brain module for self-awareness (as opposed to awareness of others). All the same, I couldn't help feeling that the authors were having to work pretty hard to get all their material to hang together—as if they were trying to facilitate a discussion by a hundred blind men groping their way around an elephant towards a consensus on what the elephant actually is.

Such is the slippery beast of identity... ; )

False product memory: a love/hate thing?

Reader Andy Pearson kindly emailed me a link to this post by Clive Thompson on a fascinating bit of research into website interactivity and false memory:

Can an interactive web site produce false memories?

Possibly so, according to a fascinating paper to be published this month in the Journal of Consumer Research by Ann Schlosser, a business professor at the University of Washington. Schlosser performed an intriguing experiment: She took two groups of people and had them check out two different web sites devoted to the same digital camera. One site included static pictures; the other was interactive, allowing users to play around with a virtual version of the product.

Later, she tested them on their ability to recall details about the camera. She intentionally included details that were false, but sufficiently plausible that they might have been true. The result? The people who viewed the interactive demo of the camera were much more likely than the folks who'd only viewed static images to "remember" the false details as being present. Or another way of putting it: The interactive demo was more likely to produce false memories of the product -- potential buyers who thought the camera could do things it can't.

Why? Schlosser theorizees that it's partly because interactivity encourages more "certainty" in our memories, and thus increases the likelihood that we'll believe suggestively false details to be true.

I pondered for a while how this phenomenon might be understood in terms of identity. Then it struck me that, when a person interacts with the digital representation of a product, the difference between a one-dimensional interaction on one hand, and a rich and fluid interaction on the other is rather akin to the difference between a platonic and romantic interpersonal relationship.

With a platonic friend, we experience the relationship from a relatively consistent perspective; boundaries are clear, the social and functional context of the relationship firmly established.

With a lover, by contrast, our whole world view is turned upside down and inside out as we experience the boundaries between Self and Other becoming deliciously (and sometimes alarmingly!) fluid, and we feel the soul of the Other resonate in depths of our psyche that we visit seldom or never. In our desire for union with our lover, we want to know everything about her—and what we don't or can't know, we happily imagine.

Is it too far fetched to imagine, then, that our greater willingness to believe that we know information about a product when we have experienced an interaction with that product that is relatively rich, fluid—intimate, even—could be no more than the effects of an incipient romance?

On the other hand, it would also be interesting to know whether or not the false memory effect arose in the case of products which the subject fluidly interacted with but ultimately disliked, as well as with those they liked. This would actually also make sense to me, as we tend to project identity traits onto those we feel strongly about positively or negatively—if someone slights me, I might obsess about their reasons for doing so, imagining all sorts of fictional motivations on their part.

Memory and identity

Charla and I watched a fascinating documentary about a guy who suffered a "psychogenic fugue" on tv the other week. It reminded us a lot of another documentary on the same subject we saw some months ago. In both cases, a young (twentysomething) man lost his memories of the events of his life—his whole life in one case, and a couple of years in the other.

Both men began to rebuild their memories by talking to family and friends, and by watching videos of themselves on holiday and so on. They discover that they didn't always behave so attractively: each was popular in a laddish way, but often too drunk, and abusive and parasitic in relation to the people they were closest to. Acting out their demons, they started to alienate those around them. In one case at least, the severe stress of rejection by friends, family and a romantic partner seemed likely to have triggered the psychogenic fugue as a "coping mechanism", wiping out painful memory upon painful memory.

But here's the fascinating part for me.

Both men, post-memory loss, are horrified at their former self's behaviour. "What an idiot I was", they realise. Each develops a philosophical approach to their life, and a compassionate approach to relating to others. The transformation of character is remarkable. Yet all that has been lost, surely, is memory!

Also fascinating was the way in which, as one of the subjects begins to recover the traumatic memories that seemed to have triggered the fugue—namely his relationship with his ex-girlfriend and its breakdown—he moves on from the failure of his relationship quite easily. Previously, the way the relationship failure was tapping into a whole web of negative memories of rejection and failure had seemed to keep him trapped in a hopeless ambition to win back the girl (who had settled down with a new partner). But with just the core negative memory surfacing, he seems able to recontextualise in the context of his philosophical approach to the otherwise blank slate of his new life.

So what does all this tell us about human character and identity? Is one of the most significant factors in its formation our ongoing reactions to layer on layer of experiences stored as memories? And if so, if we can somehow loosen the hold of negative memories' over our beliefs about ourselves and others, can we transform our character and sense of our own and others' identity?

I suspect that we can and do do this in tiny increments all the time, without the need for psychogenic fugues—call it the acquisition of wisdom, or the letting go of rigid and defensive certainties. A lifelong process indeed. But it sure was interesting to see it speeded up on the telly.