Friday, January 27, 2012

How good are you at forgetting?

Yes, forgetting is a skill.  And it’s just like any other skill – it can be improved with training and practice.  But, day to day, we rarely think of it as a skill worth developing.

Well, think again.

Memory, of course, is forgetting’s polar opposite, and is widely praised as a human skill.  But when was the last time you heard someone declare this New Year’s Resolution: “This year, I’m going to learn how to forget.” 

A new book titled “Memory: Fragments of a Modern History”, and an article published last month in Scientific American, explore the delicate relationship between memory and mental health. It charts our centuries-old love affair with memory and focuses attention on research over the last two decades that challenges the long-held Freudian view that mental health is always improved by remembering.  Indeed, in certain cases, a person might be better off learning to forget. 

The most dramatic examples, of course, deal with violence – veterans returning home from war, women subjected to domestic violence, crimes perpetrated against our fellow man.  In cases like these, some experts insist that learning to forget is the healthier approach.   Both the book and the SA article explain that beginning in the 1990s, neuroscience researchers began to challenge age-old concepts about memory.  This new wave of research led to a fresh approach for dealing with traumatic memories.  And research over the last 20 years appears to support many of these approaches – with experts providing patients with techniques to help them forget. 

Three such techniques include: thought substitution (pre-planning a thought to focus on when the negative memory arrives), memory suppression (learning to block the thought) and activation (taking a specific pre-planned action – say, pressing a button on a computer – when negative thoughts appear; said cognitive psychologist Tracy Tomlinson, who was quoted in the Scientific American article: “Action interferes with recollection”).  Each method has been shown to be effective over time, through repetition and training.

But is forgetting a cop-out?  After all, isn’t it important that we remember the past, both to honor it and grow from it?  Perhaps.  But perhaps not in all cases. Certainly, knowing what’s worth remembering and what’s worth forgetting is important, and calls upon our ethical standing.  But, used judiciously, learning how to forget can probably go a long way to improve a person’s mental health. 

And that might be something worth remembering. 

Friday, January 20, 2012

Does fantasizing about the future help us achieve it?

Apparently not, according to researchers who claim that positive fantasies about the future actually backfire because they reduce our energy to pursue them.  The research substantiates recent findings that visualizing positive outcomes – for years thought to lead to positive outcomes – diminishes the chances of reaching one’s goal.  This new study explains why: it reduces our energy to achieve them. 

They “make energy seem unnecessary,” according to study authors Heather Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen, who were quoted in Research Digest, a blog from The British Psychological Society.  Kappes and Oettingen explain that “by allowing people to consummate a desired future,” energy is diminished in that, according to BPS: “positive fantasies trigger the relaxation that would normally accompany actual achievement, rather than marshaling the energy needed to obtain it.”  The researchers demonstrated this process, across four studies. 

They concluded: "Instead of promoting achievement, positive fantasies will sap job-seekers of the energy to pound the pavement, and drain the lovelorn of the energy to approach the one they like." The authors further explained: "Fantasies that are less positive - that question whether an ideal future can be achieved, and that depict obstacles, problems and setbacks - should be more beneficial for mustering the energy needed to obtain success."

The question remains, is there any benefit whatsoever to positive fantasies.  The BPS blog entry suggests: “From a survival perspective, if a goal, such as food or water, is unobtainable, there could be some advantage to enjoying a fantasy that switches you into a low-energy mode. Similarly, if a task fills you with dread and your short-term goal is relaxation, then indulging in positive fantasies about desired outcomes could be a way to reduce anxiety.”

Friday, January 13, 2012

When it comes to sex, who do teens trust more? Parents or friends?

This might surprise you . . . but it’s their parents.  In a national online study, researchers from the University of Montreal found that 45% of teenagers consider their parents to be their sexuality role model, compared with 32% who looked to their friends.  Another 15% named celebrities as their sexual role model.

Interestingly, 78% of the mothers who participated in the study believed that their children modeled their friends’ sexual behavior.  Co-author Dr. Jean Frappier said this means that “parents seem to underestimate their role and the impact they have.”  Frappier added: “Health professionals and the media have an important role to play in empowering parents and enabling them to increase their communications with their children with regards to sexual health issues.”

According to a press release from the University of Montreal, “the survey also revealed that many of the teenagers who look to their parents live in families where sexuality is openly discussed, and that moreover, teenagers in these families have a greater awareness of the risks and consequences of sexually transmitted infections.” Added Frappier: “Good communication within families and especially around sexual health issues is associated with more responsible behaviours.” 

The survey involved 1,139 mothers of teenagers and 1,171 youths between 14 and 17 years old.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Does your memory diminish when you walk through a doorway?

It sounds so strange, but it’s true. When you walk through a doorway, your memory suffers. But why? Researchers say that it has to do with “event boundaries”, that is, the effect has more to do with physical space than how that information is encoded. So when you walk through a doorway you’re entering a new physical space, and this triggers your brain to update its memory and create a new “memory episode.”

In all, three experiments were conducted, by Gabriel A. Radvansky , Sabine A. Krawietz & Andrea K. Tamplin of Notre Dame’s Dept. of Psychology. Study participants were asked to remember objects in a room, then recall them at a later time. A study summary, published by BPS’ Research Digest, stated: “The key finding is that memory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room.”

Experiment #1 was in a 55-room virtual setting where participants were asked to enter a room, pick up an object from a table (the object would disappear once they picked it up), then deposit that object at another table – sometimes in the same room, sometimes in a new room. Participants were asked to recall the object that they were carrying. When researchers discovered the memory lapse from passing through a doorway, they wondered if the virtual setting might be the cause. Enter experiment #2, a real-life network of rooms. Same elements, same result – participants were more skilled at recalling objects when they remained in the same room.

The question now was: perhaps this odd memory effect had to do with context, that is, that recall was linked to “where” they picked up the object (i.e., where they originally encoded it into their memory). Researchers asked: is it easier to recall an object/idea based on where you first learned it? (author’s note: reading about “context”, I immediately thought about when I misplace my keys, and my tendency to return to the place that I last remembered them). Researchers tested the context hypothesis, by allowing participants to return to the room in which they originally encoded the memory, but again found no substantive difference. Their conclusion? Crossing through a doorway does indeed alter memory. In fact, the study found that the more rooms a person visited, they weaker their memory became.

Implications? Hmmm, hard to fathom, but perhaps if you’re putting away the Christmas decorations in a new location, you just might want to hang out in that room a bit longer, to make sure that the memory is fully encoded. After all, once you leave the room, a new memory episode begins.