Introduction to Psychology .
Psychology of sensation, perception, memory
Psychology is the science of behavior and mental processes. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist, and can be classified as a social scientist, behavioral scientist, or cognitive scientist. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring the physiological and neurobiological processes that underlie certain functions and behaviors. Psychologists explore such concepts as perception, cognition, attention, emotion, phenomenology, motivation, brain functioning, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Some, especially depth psychologists, also consider the unconscious mind. Psychologists employ empirical methods to infer causal and correlational relationships between psychosocial variables. In addition, or in opposition, to employing empirical and deductive methods, some—especially clinical and counseling psychologists—at times rely upon symbolic interpretation and other inductive techniques. Psychology incorporates research from the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities, such as philosophy.
While psychological knowledge is often applied to the assessment and treatment of mental health problems, it is also applied to understanding and solving problems in many different spheres of human activity. Although the majority of psychologists are involved in some kind of therapeutic role (clinical, counseling, and school positions), many do scientific research on a wide range of topics related to mental processes and behavior (typically in university psychology departments) or teach such knowledge in academic settings; and some are employed in industrial and organizational settings, and in other areas such as human development and aging, sports, health, the media, law, and forensics.
Etymology
The word psychology literally means, according to “Webster’s Dictionary”, “the study of the soul” (ψυχή, psukhē, meaning “breath”, “spirit”, or “soul”; and -λογία -logia, translated as “study of” or “research” ). The Latin word psychologia was first used by the Croatian humanist and Latinist Marko Marulić in his book, Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae in the late 15th century or early 16th century. The earliest known reference to the word psychology in English was by Steven Blankaart in
History
Main article: History of psychology
Wilhelm Wundt (seated) with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind. Wundt is credited with setting up psychology as a field of scientific inquiry independent of the disciplines philosophy and biology.
The study of psychology in a philosophical context dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, India, and Persia. Historians point to the writings of ancient Greek philosophers, such as Thales, Plato, and Aristotle (especially in his De Anima treatise), as the first significant body of work in the West to be rich in psychological thought.
Structuralism
German physician Wilhelm Wundt is credited with introducing psychological discovery into a laboratory setting. Known as the “father of experimental psychology“, he founded the first psychological laboratory, at Leipzig University, in 1879. Wundt focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components. Edward Titchener was another major structuralist thinker.
Functionalism
Functionalism formed as a reaction to the theories of the structuralist school of thought and was heavily influenced by the work of the American philosopher, scientist and psychologist William James. James felt that psychology should have practical value, and that psychologists should find out how the mind can function to a person’s benefit. In his book, Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, he laid the foundations for many of the questions that psychologists would explore for years to come. Other major functionalist thinkers included John Dewey and Harvey Carr.
Other 19th-century contributors to the field include the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, a pioneer in the experimental study of memory, who developed quantitative models of learning and forgetting at the University of Berlin; and the Russian-Soviet physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who discovered in dogs a learning process that was later termed “classical conditioning” and applied to human beings.
Starting in the 1950s, the experimental techniques set forth by Wundt, James, Ebbinghaus, and others would be reiterated as experimental psychology became increasingly cognitive—concerned with information and its processing—and, eventually, constituted a part of the wider cognitive science. In its early years, this development had been seen as a “revolution“, as it both responded to and reacted against strains of thought—including psychodynamics and behaviorism—that had developed in the meantime.
Psychoanalysis
From the 1890s until his death in 1939, the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis, a method of investigation of the mind and the way one thinks; a systematized set of theories about human behavior; and a form of psychotherapy to treat psychological or emotional distress, especially unconscious conflict. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory was largely based on interpretive methods, introspection and clinical observations. It became very well known, largely because it tackled subjects such as sexuality, repression, and the unconscious mind as general aspects of psychological development. These were largely considered taboo subjects at the time, and Freud provided a catalyst for them to be openly discussed in polite society. Clinically, Freud helped to pioneer the method of free association and a therapeutic interest in dream interpretation.
Group photo
Freud had a significant influence on Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, whose analytical psychology became an alternative form of depth psychology. Other well-known psychoanalytic scholars of the mid-20th century included psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers. Among these thinkers were Erik Erikson, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, John Bowlby, and Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud. Throughout the 20th century, psychoanalysis evolved into diverse schools of thought, most of which may be classed as Neo-Freudian.
Psychoanalytic theory and therapy were criticized by psychologists such as Hans Eysenck, and by philosophers including Karl Popper. Popper, a philosopher of science, argued that psychoanalysis had been misrepresented as a scientific discipline, whereas Eysenck said that psychoanalytic tenets had been contradicted by experimental data. By the 20th century, psychology departments in American universities had become scientifically oriented, marginalizing Freudian theory and dismissing it as a “desiccated and dead” historical artifact. Meanwhile, however, researchers in the emerging field of neuro-psychoanalysis defended some of Freud’s ideas on scientific grounds, while scholars of the humanities maintained that Freud was not a “scientist at all, but … an interpreter.”
Behaviorism
Skinner’s teaching machine, a mechanical invention to automate the task of programmed instruction.
In the United States, behaviorism became the dominant school of thought during the 1950s. Behaviorism was founded in the early 20th century by John B. Watson, and embraced and extended by Edward Thorndike, Clark L. Hull, Edward C. Tolman, and later B.F. Skinner. Theories of learning emphasized the ways in which people might be predisposed, or conditioned, by their environments to behave in certain ways.
Classical conditioning was an early behaviorist model. It posited that behavioral tendencies are determined by immediate associations between various environmental stimuli and the degree of pleasure or pain that follows. Behavioral patterns, then, were understood to consist of organisms’ conditioned responses to the stimuli in their environment. The stimuli were held to exert influence in proportion to their prior repetition or to the previous intensity of their associated pain or pleasure. Much research consisted of laboratory-based animal experimentation, which was increasing in popularity as physiology grew more sophisticated.
Skinner’s behaviorism shared with its predecessors a philosophical inclination toward positivism and determinism. He believed that the contents of the mind were not open to scientific scrutiny and that scientific psychology should emphasize the study of observable behavior. He focused on behavior–environment relations and analyzed overt and covert (i.e., private) behavior as a function of the organism interacting with its environment. Behaviorists usually rejected or deemphasized dualistic explanations such as “mind” or “consciousness”; and, in lieu of probing an “unconscious mind” that underlies unawareness, they spoke of the “contingency-shaped behaviors” in which unawareness becomes outwardly manifest.
Among the behaviorists’ most famous creations are John B. Watson’s Little Albert experiment, which applied classical conditioning to the developing human child, and Skinner’s notion of operant conditioning, which acknowledged that human agency could affect patterns and cycles of environmental stimuli and behavioral responses.
Linguist Noam Chomsky‘s critique of the behaviorist model of language acquisition is widely regarded as a key factor in the decline of behaviorism’s prominence. Martin Seligman and colleagues discovered that the conditioning of dogs led to outcomes (“learned helplessness“) that opposed the predictions of behaviorism. But Skinner’s behaviorism did not die, perhaps in part because it generated successful practical applications. The fall of behaviorism as an overarching model in psychology, however, gave way to a new dominant paradigm: cognitive approaches.
Humanism
Psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 posited that humans have a hierarchy of needs, and it makes sense to fulfill the basic needs first (food, water etc.) before higher-order needs can be met.
Humanistic psychology was developed in the 1950s in reaction to both behaviorism and psychoanalysis. By using phenomenology, intersubjectivity and first-person categories, the humanistic approach sought to glimpse the whole person—not just the fragmented parts of the personality or cognitive functioning. Humanism focused on fundamentally and uniquely human issues, such as individual free will, personal growth, self-actualization, self-identity, death, aloneness, freedom, and meaning. The humanistic approach was distinguished by its emphasis on subjective meaning, rejection of determinism, and concern for positive growth rather than pathology. Some of the founders of the humanistic school of thought were American psychologists Abraham Maslow, who formulated a hierarchy of humaeeds, and Carl Rogers, who created and developed client-centered therapy. Later, positive psychology opened up humanistic themes to scientific modes of exploration.
Gestalt
Wolfgang Kohler, Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka co-founded the school of Gestalt psychology. This approach is based upon the idea that individuals experience things as unified wholes. This approach to psychology began in Germany and Austria during the late 19th century in response to the molecular approach of structuralism. Rather than breaking down thoughts and behavior to their smallest element, the Gestalt position maintains that the whole of experience is important, and the whole is different than the sum of its parts.
Gestalt psychology should not be confused with the Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls, which is only peripherally linked to Gestalt psychology.
Existentialism
Influenced largely by the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, psychoanalytically trained American psychologist Rollo May pioneered an existential branch of psychology, which included existential therapy, in the 1950s and 1960s. Existential psychologists differed from others often classified as humanistic in their comparatively neutral view of humaature and in their relatively positive assessment of anxiety. Existential psychologists emphasized the humanistic themes of death, free will, and meaning, suggesting that meaning can be shaped by myths, or narrative patterns, and that it can be encouraged by an acceptance of the free will requisite to an authentic, albeit often anxious, regard for death and other future prospects. Austrian existential psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl drew evidence of meaning’s therapeutic power from reflections garnered from his own internment, and he created a variety of existential psychotherapy called logotherapy. In addition to May and Frankl, Swiss psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger and American psychologist George Kelly may be said to belong to the existential school.
Cognitivism
Baddeley’s model of working memory
Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember, and learn. As part of the larger field of cognitive science, this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics.
Noam Chomsky helped to ignite a “cognitive revolution” in psychology when he criticized the behaviorists’ notions of “stimulus”, “response”, and “reinforcement”, arguing that such ideas—which Skinner had borrowed from animal experiments in the laboratory—could be applied to complex human behavior, most notably language acquisition, in only a vague and superficial manner. The postulation that humans are born with the instinct or “innate facility” for acquiring language posed a challenge to the behaviorist position that all behavior (including language) is contingent upon learning and reinforcement. Social learning theorists, such as Albert Bandura, argued that the child’s environment could make contributions of its own to the behaviors of an observant subject.
The Müller-Lyer illusion. Psychologists make inferences about mental processes from shared phenomena such as optical illusions.
Meanwhile, accumulating technology helped to renew interest and belief in the mental states and representations—i.e., the cognition—that had fallen out of favor with behaviorists. English neuroscientist Charles Sherrington and Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb used experimental methods to link psychological phenomena with the structure and function of the brain. With the rise of computer science and artificial intelligence, analogies were drawn between the processing of information by humans and information processing by machines. Research in cognition had proven practical since World War II, when it aided in the understanding of weapons operation. By the late 20th century, though, cognitivism had become the dominant paradigm of mainstream psychology, and cognitive psychology emerged as a popular branch.
Assuming both that the covert mind should be studied and that the scientific method should be used to study it, cognitive psychologists set such concepts as “subliminal processing” and “implicit memory” in place of the psychoanalytic “unconscious mind” or the behavioristic “contingency-shaped behaviors”. Elements of behaviorism and cognitive psychology were synthesized to form the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of psychotherapy modified from techniques developed by American psychologist Albert Ellis and American psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck. Cognitive psychology was subsumed along with other disciplines, such as philosophy of mind, computer science, and neuroscience, under the umbrella discipline of cognitive science.
Biopsychosocial model
The biopsychosocial model is an integrated perspective toward understanding consciousness, behavior, and social interaction. It assumes that any given behavior or mental process affects and is affected by dynamically interrelated biological, psychological, and social factors. The psychological aspect refers to the role that cognition and emotions play in any given psychological phenomenon—for example, the effect of mood or beliefs and expectations on an individual’s reactions to an event. The biological aspect refers to the role of biological factors in psychological phenomena—for example, the effect of the prenatal environment on brain development and cognitive abilities, or the influence of genes on individual dispositions. The socio-cultural aspect refers to the role that social and cultural environments play in a given psychological phenomenon—for example, the role of parental or peer influence in the behaviors or characteristics of an individual.
Discursive psychology
Discursive psychology was developed in the 1990s by Jonathan Potter and Derek Edwards. It examines how psychological phenomena are created, made relevant and put to use in discourse, verbal interaction and everyday talk. It is opposed to cognitivist approaches.
Critical psychology
Critical psychology is aimed at critiquing mainstream psychology and attempts to apply psychology in more progressive ways, often looking towards social change as a means of preventing and treating psychopathology. One of critical psychology’s main criticisms of conventional psychology is how it ignores the way power differences between social classes and groups can impact the mental and physical well-being of individuals or groups of people. Contributors to the field include Klaus Holzkamp and Ian Parker. Key elements within critical psychology include the study of power relations, situated knowledge, and the dualism of the self and agency and the dualism of the individual and the social.
Subfields
Psychology encompasses a vast domain, and includes many different approaches to the study of mental processes and behavior.
Biological
Main articles: Biological psychology, Neuropsychology, Physiological psychology, and Cognitive neuroscience
MRI depicting the human brain. The arrow indicates the position of the hypothalamus.
Biological psychology or behavioral neuroscience is the study of the biological substrates of behavior and mental processes. There are different specialties within behavioral neuroscience. For example, physiological psychologists use animal models (typically rats) to study the neural, genetic, and cellular mechanisms that underlie specific behaviors such as learning and memory and fear responses. Cognitive neuroscientists investigate the neural correlates of psychological processes in humans using neural imaging tools, and neuropsychologists conduct psychological assessments to determine, for instance, specific aspects and extent of cognitive deficit caused by brain damage or disease.
Clinical
Clinical psychologists work with individuals, children, families, couples, or small groups.
Clinical psychology includes the study and application of psychology for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically-based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and personal development. Central to its practice are psychological assessment and psychotherapy, although clinical psychologists may also engage in research, teaching, consultation, forensic testimony, and program development and administration. Some clinical psychologists may focus on the clinical management of patients with brain injury—this area is known as clinical neuropsychology. In many countries, clinical psychology is a regulated mental health profession.
The work performed by clinical psychologists tends to be influenced by various therapeutic approaches, all of which involve a formal relationship between professional and client (usually an individual, couple, family, or small group). The various therapeutic approaches and practices are associated with different theoretical perspectives and employ different procedures intended to form a therapeutic alliance, explore the nature of psychological problems, and encourage new ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving. Four major theoretical perspectives are psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, existential–humanistic, and systems or family therapy. There has been a growing movement to integrate the various therapeutic approaches, especially with an increased understanding of issues regarding culture, gender, spirituality, and sexual-orientation. With the advent of more robust research findings regarding psychotherapy, there is evidence that most of the major therapies are about of equal effectiveness, with the key common element being a strong therapeutic alliance. Because of this, more training programs and psychologists are now adopting an eclectic therapeutic orientation.
Cognitive
Green Red Blue
Purple Blue Purple
Blue Purple Red
Green Purple Green
The Stroop effect refers to the fact that naming the color of the first set of words is easier and quicker than the second.
Cognitive psychology studies cognition, the mental processes underlying mental activity. Perception, learning, problem solving, reasoning, thinking, memory, attention, language and emotion are areas of research. Classical cognitive psychology is associated with a school of thought known as cognitivism, whose adherents argue for an information processing model of mental function, informed by functionalism and experimental psychology.
On a broader level, cognitive science is an interdisciplinary enterprise of cognitive psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, researchers in artificial intelligence, linguists, human–computer interaction, computational neuroscience, logicians and social scientists. Computational models are sometimes used to simulate phenomena of interest. Computational models provide a tool for studying the functional organization of the mind whereas neuroscience provides measures of brain activity.
Comparative
The common chimpanzee can use tools. This chimpanzee is using a stick in order to get food.
Main article: Comparative psychology
Comparative psychology refers to the study of the behavior and mental life of animals other than human beings. It is related to disciplines outside of psychology that study animal behavior such as ethology. Although the field of psychology is primarily concerned with humans, the behavior and mental processes of animals is also an important part of psychological research. This being either as a subject in its own right (e.g., animal cognition and ethology) or with strong emphasis about evolutionary links, and somewhat more controversially, as a way of gaining an insight into human psychology. This is achieved by means of comparison or via animal models of emotional and behavior systems as seen in neuroscience of psychology (e.g., affective neuroscience and social neuroscience).
Developmental
A baby with a book.
Mainly focusing on the development of the human mind through the life span, developmental psychology seeks to understand how people come to perceive, understand, and act within the world and how these processes change as they age. This may focus on intellectual, cognitive, neural, social, or moral development. Researchers who study children use a number of unique research methods to make observations iatural settings or to engage them in experimental tasks. Such tasks often resemble specially designed games and activities that are both enjoyable for the child and scientifically useful, and researchers have even devised clever methods to study the mental processes of small infants. In addition to studying children, developmental psychologists also study aging and processes throughout the life span, especially at other times of rapid change (such as adolescence and old age). Developmental psychologists draw on the full range of psychological theories to inform their research.
Educational and school
An example of an item from a cognitive abilities test used in educational psychology.
Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations. The work of child psychologists such as Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, Bernard Luskin and Jerome Bruner has been influential in creating teaching methods and educational practices. Educational psychology is often included in teacher education programs, in places such as North America, Australia, and New Zealand.
School psychology combines principles from educational psychology and clinical psychology to understand and treat students with learning disabilities; to foster the intellectual growth of gifted students; to facilitate prosocial behaviors in adolescents; and otherwise to promote safe, supportive, and effective learning environments. School psychologists are trained in educational and behavioral assessment, intervention, prevention, and consultation, and many have extensive training in research.
Evolutionary
Evolutionary psychology examines psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that psychological adaptations evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments. By focusing on the evolution of psychological traits and their adaptive functions, it offers complementary explanations for the mostly proximate or developmental explanations developed by other areas of psychology (that is, it focuses mostly on ultimate or “why?” questions, rather than proximate or “how?” questions).
Industrial–organizational
Industrial and organizational psychology (I–O) applies psychological concepts and methods to optimize human potential in the workplace. Personnel psychology, a subfield of I–O psychology, applies the methods and principles of psychology in selecting and evaluating workers. I–O psychology’s other subfield, organizational psychology, examines the effects of work environments and management styles on worker motivation, job satisfaction, and productivity.
Personality
Personality psychology is concerned to enduring patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion in individuals, commonly referred to as personality. Theories of personality vary across different psychological schools and orientations. They carry different assumptions about such issues as the role of the unconscious and the importance of childhood experience. According to Freud, personality is based on the dynamic interactions of the id, ego, and super-ego. Trait theorists, in contrast, attempt to analyze personality in terms of a discrete number of key traits by the statistical method of factor analysis. The number of proposed traits has varied widely. An early model proposed by Hans Eysenck suggested that there are three traits that comprise human personality: extraversion–introversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism. Raymond Cattell proposed a theory of 16 personality factors. The “Big Five“, or Five Factor Model, proposed by Lewis Goldberg, currently has strong support among trait theorists.
Social
Social psychology studies the nature and causes of social behavior.
See also: Social psychology and Social psychology (sociology)
Social psychology is the study of how humans think about each other and how they relate to each other. Social psychologists study such topics as the influence of others on an individual’s behavior (e.g. conformity, persuasion), and the formation of beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes about other people. Social cognition fuses elements of social and cognitive psychology in order to understand how people process, remember, and distort social information. The study of group dynamics reveals information about the nature and potential optimization of leadership, communication, and other phenomena that emerge at least at the microsocial level. In recent years, many social psychologists have become increasingly interested in implicit measures, mediational models, and the interaction of both person and social variables in accounting for behavior. The study of human society, is therefore a potentially valuable source of information about the causes of psychiatric disorder. Some of the sociological concepts applied to psychiatric disorders are the social role, sick role, social class, life event, culture, migration, social and total institution.
Positive
Positive psychology derives from Maslow’s humanistic psychology. Positive psychology is a discipline that utilizes evidence-based scientific methods to study factors that contribute to human happiness and strength. Different from clinical psychology, positive psychology is concerned with improving the mental well-being of healthy clients. Positive psychological interventions now have received tentative support for their beneficial effects on clients. In 2010 Clinical Psychological Review published a special issue devoted to positive psychological interventions, such as gratitude journaling and the physical expression of gratitude. There is, however, a need for further research on the effects of interventions. Positive psychological interventions have been limited in scope but their effects are thought to be superior to that of placebos, especially with regard to helping people with body image problems.
Research methods
Psychology tends to be eclectic, drawing on knowledge from other fields to help explain and understand psychological phenomena. Additionally, psychologists make extensive use of the three modes of inference that were identified by C.S. Peirce: deduction, induction, and abduction (hypothesis generation). While often employing deductive–nomological reasoning, they also rely on inductive reasoning to generate explanations. For example, evolutionary psychologists attempt to explain psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection.
Psychologists may conduct basic research aiming for further understanding in a particular area of interest in psychology, or conduct applied research to solve problems in the clinic, workplace or other areas. Masters level clinical programs aim to train students in both research methods and evidence-based practice. Professional associations have established guidelines for ethics, training, research methodology and professional practice. In addition, depending on the country, state or region, psychological services and the title “psychologist” may be governed by statute and psychologists who offer services to the public are usually required to be licensed.
Qualitative and quantitative research
Research in most areas of psychology is conducted in accord with the standards of the scientific method. Psychological researchers seek the emergence of theoretically interesting categories and hypotheses from data, using qualitative or quantitative methods (or both).
Qualitative psychological research methods include interviews, first-hand observation, and participant observation. Creswell (2003) identifies five main possibilities for quantitative research, including narrative, phenomenology, ethnography, case study and grounded theory. Qualitative researchers sometimes aim to enrich interpretations or critiques of symbols, subjective experiences, or social structures. Similar hermeneutic and critical aims have also been served by “quantitative methods”, as in Erich Fromm‘s study of Nazi voting or Stanley Milgram‘s studies of obedience to authority.
Quantitative psychological research lends itself to the statistical testing of hypotheses. Quantitatively oriented research designs include the experiment, quasi-experiment, cross-sectional study, case-control study, and longitudinal study. The measurement and operationalization of important constructs is an essential part of these research designs. Statistical methods include the Pearson product–moment correlation coefficient, the analysis of variance, multiple linear regression, logistic regression, structural equation modeling, and hierarchical linear modeling.
Controlled experiments
Main article: Experiment
Flowchart of four phases (enrollment, intervention allocation, follow-up, and data analysis) of a parallel randomized trial of two groups, modified from the CONSORT 2010 Statement.
Experimental psychological research is conducted in a laboratory under controlled conditions. This method of research relies on the application of the scientific method to understand behavior. Experimenters use several types of measurements, including rate of response, reaction time, and various psychometric measurements. Experiments are designed to test specific hypotheses (deductive approach) or evaluate functional relationships (inductive approach). A true experiment with random allocation of subjects to conditions allows researchers to infer causal relationships between different aspects of behavior and the environment. In an experiment, one or more variables of interest are controlled by the experimenter (independent variable) and another variable is measured in response to different conditions (dependent variable). Experiments are one of the primary research methods in many areas of psychology, particularly cognitive/psychonomics, mathematical psychology, psychophysiology and biological psychology/cognitive neuroscience.
Experiments on humans have been put under some controls, namely informed and voluntary consent. After World War II, the Nuremberg Code was established, because of Nazi abuses of experimental subjects. Later, most countries (and scientific journals) adopted the Declaration of Helsinki. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health established the Institutional Review Board in 1966, and in 1974 adopted the National Research Act (HR 7724). All of these measures encouraged researchers to obtain informed consent from human participants in experimental studies. A number of influential studies led to the establishment of this rule; such studies included the MIT and Fernald School radioisotope studies, the Thalidomide tragedy, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, and Stanley Milgram‘s studies of obedience to authority.
Survey questionnaires
Statistical surveys are used in psychology for measuring attitudes and traits, monitoring changes in mood, checking the validity of experimental manipulations, and for a wide variety of other psychological topics. Most commonly, psychologists use paper-and-pencil surveys. However, surveys are also conducted over the phone or through e-mail. Increasingly, web-based surveys are being used in research. Similar methodology is also used in applied setting, such as clinical assessment and personnel assessment.
Longitudinal studies
Longitudinal studies are often used in psychology to study developmental trends across the life span, and in sociology to study life events throughout lifetimes or generations. The reason for this is that unlike cross-sectional studies, longitudinal studies track the same people, and therefore the differences observed in those people are less likely to be the result of cultural differences across generations. Because of this benefit, longitudinal studies make observing changes more accurate and they are applied in various other fields.
Because most longitudinal studies are observational, in the sense that they observe the state of the world without manipulating it, it has been argued that they may have less power to detect causal relationships than do experiments. They also suffer methodological limitations such as from selective attrition because people with similar characteristics may be more likely to drop out of the study making it difficult to analyze.
Some longitudinal studies are experiments, called repeated-measures experiments. Psychologists often use the crossover design to reduce the influence of confounding covariates and to reduce the number of subjects.
Observation iatural settings
Phineas P. Gage survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain’s left frontal lobe, and is remembered for that injury’s reported effects on his personality and behavior.
In the same way Jane Goodall studied the role of chimpanzee social and family life, psychologists conduct similar observational studies in human social, professional and family lives. Sometimes the participants are aware they are being observed and other times it is covert: the participants do not know they are being observed. Ethical guidelines need to be taken into consideration when covert observation is being carried out.
Qualitative and descriptive research
Artificial neural network with two layers, an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in the human brain.
Research designed to answer questions about the current state of affairs such as the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of individuals is known as descriptive research. Descriptive research can be qualitative or quantitative in orientation. Qualitative research is descriptive research that is focused on observing and describing events as they occur, with the goal of capturing all of the richness of everyday behavior and with the hope of discovering and understanding phenomena that might have been missed if only more cursory examinations have been made.
Neuropsychological methods
A rat undergoing a Morris water navigation test used in behavioral neuroscience to study the role of the hippocampus in spatial learning and memory.
Neuropsychology seeks to connect aspects of behavior and mental activity with the structure and function of the brain. Cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuropsychiatry study neurological or mental impairment in an attempt to infer theories of normal mind and brain function. This typically involves looking for differences in patterns of remaining ability (known as “functional disassociations”) which can give clues as to whether abilities are composed of smaller functions, or are controlled by a single cognitive mechanism.
In addition, experimental techniques are often used to study the neuropsychology of healthy individuals. These include behavioral experiments, brain-scanning or functional neuroimaging, used to examine the activity of the brain during task performance, and techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, which can safely alter the function of small brain areas to reveal their importance in mental operations.
Computational modeling
The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subject believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level etc.
Computational modeling is a tool often used in mathematical psychology and cognitive psychology to simulate a particular behavior using a computer. This method has several advantages. Since modern computers process extremely quickly, many simulations can be run in a short time, allowing for a great deal of statistical power. Modeling also allows psychologists to visualize hypotheses about the functional organization of mental events that couldn’t be directly observed in a human.
Several different types of modeling are used to study behavior. Connectionism uses neural networks to simulate the brain. Another method is symbolic modeling, which represents many different mental objects using variables and rules. Other types of modeling include dynamic systems and stochastic modeling.
Animal studies
Animal learning experiments aid in investigating the biological basis of teaching, memory and behavior. In the 1890s, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov famously used dogs to demonstrate classical conditioning. Non-human primates, cats, dogs, pigeons, rats and other rodents are often used in psychological experiments. Ideally, controlled experiments introduce only one independent variable at a time, in order to ascertain its unique effects upon dependent variables. These conditions are approximated best in laboratory settings. In contrast, human environments and genetic backgrounds vary so widely, and depend upon so many factors, that it is difficult to control important variables for human subjects. Of course, there are pitfalls in generalizing findings from animal studies to humans although animal models can be helpful in developing an understanding of human behavior (e.g., addiction research).
Criticism
Theory
Criticisms of psychological research often come from perceptions that it is a “soft” science. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn‘s 1962 critique implied psychology overall was in a pre-paradigm state, lacking the agreement on overarching theory found in mature sciences such as chemistry and physics.
Because some areas of psychology rely on research methods such as surveys and questionnaires, critics have asserted that psychology is not an objective science. Other phenomena that psychologists are interested in, such as personality, thinking, and emotion, cannot be directly measured and are often inferred from subjective self-reports, which may be problematic. Misuses of hypothesis-testing in psychology, and the use of hypothesis testing at all is controversial. Research has documented that many psychologists confuse statistical significance with practical importance. Statistically significant but practically unimportant results are common with large samples. Some psychologists have responded with an increased use of effect size statistics, rather than sole reliance on the Fisherian p < .05 significance criterion (whereby an observed difference is deemed “statistically significant” if an effect of that size or larger would occur with 5% (or less) probability in independent replications, assuming the truth of the null-hypothesis of no difference between the treatments).
Sometimes the debate comes from within psychology, for example between laboratory-oriented researchers and practitioners such as clinicians. In recent years, and particularly in the U.S., there has been increasing debate about the nature of therapeutic effectiveness and about the relevance of empirically examining psychotherapeutic strategies.
Practice
Some observers perceive a gap between scientific theory and its application—in particular, the application of unsupported or unsound clinical practices. Critics say there has been an increase in the number of mental health training programs that do not instill scientific competence. One skeptic asserts that practices, such as “facilitated communication for infantile autism”; memory-recovery techniques including body work; and other therapies, such as rebirthing and reparenting, may be dubious or even dangerous, despite their popularity. In 1984, Allen Neuringer had made a similar point regarding the experimental analysis of behavior.
Current ethical standards of psychology would not permit the following studies to be conducted today. These human studies would violate the Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association, the Canadian Code of Conduct for Research Involving Humans, and the Belmont Report. Current ethical guidelines state that using non-human animals for scientific purposes is only acceptable when the harm (physical or psychological) done to animals is outweighed by the benefits of the research. Keeping this in mind, psychologists can use on animals research techniques that would not necessarily be performed on humans.
· An experiment by Stanley Milgram raised questions about the ethics of scientific experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants. It measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
· Harry Harlow drew condemnation for his “pit of despair” experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the 1970s. The aim of the research was to produce an animal model of clinical depression. Harlow also devised what he called a “rape rack”, to which the female isolates were tied iormal monkey mating posture. In 1974, American literary critic Wayne C. Booth wrote that, “Harry Harlow and his colleagues go on torturing their nonhuman primates decade after decade, invariably proving what we all knew in advance—that social creatures can be destroyed by destroying their social ties.” He writes that Harlow made no mention of the criticism of the morality of his work. University psychology departments have ethics committees dedicated to the rights and well-being of research subjects. Researchers in psychology must gain approval of their research projects before conducting any experiment to protect the interests of human participants and laboratory animals.
Systemic bias
In 1959 statistician Theodore Sterling examined the results of psychological studies and discovered that 97% of them supported their initial hypotheses, implying a possible publication bias. Similarly Fanelli (2010) found out that 91.5% of psychiatry/psychology studies confirmed the effects they were looking for, which was around five times more often than in space– or geosciences. Fanelli argues that this is because of researchers in “softer” sciences have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases.
In
Sensation and Perception
Sensation
Sensation is the process by which our senses gather information and send it to the brain. A large amount of information is being sensed at any one time such as room temperature, brightness of the lights, someone talking, a distant train, or the smell of perfume. With all this information coming into our senses, the majority of our world never gets recognized. We don’t notice radio waves, x-rays, or the microscopic parasites crawling on our skin. We don’t sense all the odors around us or taste every individual spice in our gourmet dinner. We only sense those things we are able too since we don’t have the sense of smell like a bloodhound or the sense of sight like a hawk; our thresholds are different from these animals and often even from each other.
Absolute Threshold
The absolute threshold is the point where something becomes noticeable to our senses. It is the softest sound we can hear or the slightest touch we can feel. Anything less than this goes unnoticed. The absolute threshold is therefore the point at which a stimuli goes from undetectable to detectable to our senses.
Difference Threshold
Once a stimulus becomes detectable to us, how do we recognize if this stimulus changes. When we notice the sound of the radio in the other room, how do we notice when it becomes louder. It’s conceivable that someone could be turning it up so slightly that the difference is undetectable. The difference threshold is the amount of change needed for us to recognize that a change has occurred. This change is referred to as the Just Noticeable Difference.
This difference is not absolute, however. Imagine holding a five pound weight and one pound was added. Most of us would notice this difference. But what if we were holding a fifty pound weight? Would we notice if another pound were added? The reason many of us would not is because the change required to detect a difference has to represent a percentage. In the first scenario, one pound would increase the weight by 20%, in the second, that same weight would add only an additional 2%. This theory, named after its original observer, is referred to as Weber’s Law.
Signal Detection Theory
Have you ever been in a crowded room with lots of people talking? Situations like that can make it difficult to focus on any particular stimulus, like the conversation we are having with a friend. We are often faced with the daunting task of focusing our attention on certain things while at the same time attempting to ignore the flood of information entering our senses. When we do this, we are making a determination as to what is important to sense and what is background noise. This concept is referred to as signal detection because we attempt detect what we want to focus on and ignore or minimize everything else.
Sensory Adaptation
The last concept refers to stimuli which has become redundant or remains unchanged for an extended period of time. Ever wonder why we notice certain smells or sounds right away and then after a while they fade into the background? Once we adapt to the perfume or the ticking of the clock, we stop recognizing it. This process of becoming less sensitive to unchanging stimulus is referred to as sensory adaptation, after all, if it doesn’t change, why do we need to constantly sense it?
Perception
As mentioned in the introduction, perception refers to interpretation of what we take in through our senses. The way we perceive our environment is what makes us different from other animals and different from each other. In this section, we will discuss the various theories on how our sensation are organized and interpreted, and therefore, how we make sense of what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell.
Gestalt Principles of Grouping
The German word “Gestalt” roughly translates to “whole” or “form,” and the Gestalt psychologist’s sincerely believed that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In order to interpret what we receive through our senses, they theorized that we attempt to organize this information into certain groups. This allows us to interpret the information completely without unneeded repetition. For example, when you see one dot, you perceive it as such, but when you see five dots together, you group them together by saying a “row of dots.” Without this tendency to group our perceptions, that same row would be seen as “dot, dot, dot, dot, dot,” taking both longer to process and reducing our perceptive ability. The Gestalt principles of grouping include four types: similarity, proximity, continuity, and closure.
Similarity refers to our tendency to group things together based upon how similar to each other they are. In the first figure above, we tend to see two rows of red dots and two rows of black dots. The dots are grouped according to similar color. In the next figure, we tend to perceive three columns of two lines each rather than six different lines. The lines are grouped together because of how close they are to each other, or their proximity to one another. Continuity refers to our tendency to see patterns and therefore perceive things as belonging together if they form some type of continuous pattern. In the third figure, although merely a series of dots, it begins to look like an “X” as we perceive the upper left side as continuing all the way to the lower right and the lower left all the way to the upper right. Finally, in the fourth figure, we demonstrate closure, or our tendency to complete familiar objects that have gaps in them. Even at first glance, we perceive a circle and a square.
Maintaining Perceptual Constancy
Imagine if every time an object changed we had to completely reprocess it. The next time you walk toward a building, you would have to re-evaluate the size of the building with each step, because we all know as we get closer, everything gets bigger. The building which once stood only several inches is now somehow more than
Luckily, this doesn’t happen. Due to our ability to maintain constancy in our perceptions, we see that building as the same height no matter what distance it is. Perceptual constancy refers to our ability to see things differently without having to reinterpret the object’s properties. There are typically three constancies discussed, including size, shape, brightness.
Size constancy refers to our ability to see objects as maintaining the same size even when our distance from them makes things appear larger or smaller. This holds true for all of our senses. As we walk away from our radio, the song appears to get softer. We understand, and perceive it as being just as loud as before. The difference being our distance from what we are sensing.
Everybody has seen a plate shaped in the form of a circle. When we see that same plate from an angle, however, it looks more like an ellipse. Shape constancy allows us to perceive that plate as still being a circle even though the angle from which we view it appears to distort the shape.
Brightness constancy refers to our ability to recognize that color remains the same regardless of how it looks under different levels of light. That deep blue shirt you wore to the beach suddenly looks black when you walk indoors. Without color constancy, we would be constantly re-interpreting color and would be amazed at the miraculous conversion our clothes undertake.
Perceiving Distance
We determine distance using two different cues: monocular and binocular. Monocular cues are those cues which can be seen using only one eye. They include size; texture, overlap, shading, height, and clarity.
Size refers to the fact that larger images are perceived as closer to us, especially if the two images are of the same object. The texture of objects tend to become smoother as the object gets farther away, suggesting that more detailed textured objects are closer. Due to overlap, those objects covering part of another object is perceived as closer. The shading or shadows of objects can give a clue to their distance, allowing closer objects to cast longer shadows which will overlap objects which are farther away. Objects which are closer to the bottom of our visual field are seen as closer to us due to our perception of the horizon, where higher (height) means farther away. Similar to texture, objects tend to get blurry as they get farther away, therefore, clearer or more crisp images tend to be perceived as closer (clarity).
Binocular cues refer to those depth cues in which both eyes are needed to perceive. There are two important binocular cues; convergence and retinal disparity. Convergence refers to the fact that the closer an object, the more inward our eyes need to turn in order to focus. The farther our eyes converge, the closer an object appears to be. Since our eyes see two images which are then sent to our brains for interpretation, the distance between these two images, or their retinal disparity, provides another cue regarding the distance of the object.
Description of Disorder
As technology has developed, we have been able to gain a better understanding of the specific contents within a musical hallucination. In 73 individual cases reviewed by Evers and Ellger, 57 patients heard tunes that were familiar, while 5 heard unfamiliar tunes. These tunes ranged from religious pieces to childhood favorites, and also included popular songs from the radio. Vocal and instrumental forms of classical music were also identified in some patients. Keshavan found that the consistent feature of musical hallucinations was that it represented a personal memory trace. Memory traces refer to anything that may seem familiar to the patient, which indicated why certain childhood or familiar songs were heard.
Functional Imaging
Positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) show that musical hallucinations activate a wide variety of areas in the brain including the following: auditory areas, motor cortex, visual areas, basal ganglia, brainstem, pons, tegmentum, cerebellum, hippocampi, amygdala, and peripheral auditory system.
Causes
Investigators have successfully narrowed down the major factors that are associated with musical hallucinations. Evers & Ellgers compiled a significant portion of musical hallucination articles, case studies etc. and were able to categorize five major etiologies:
· Psychiatric Disorders
· Focal Brain Lesion
· Epilepsy
G2. Visual Hallucinations
Visual hallucinations may range in complexity from simple flashes of light to the most detailed scenes. Sometimes shadows are seen “out of the corner of the eye.” At other times fleeting shapes are seen in the darkness of the night, “as if someone were there.’ Colored shapes may float in the air. The faces of others may become disfigured, grotesque, or even melt. Bodies may float through the air; a skeleton is seen outside the window. The heavenly host appears on the horizon; the jurors march in to render their verdict.
Visual hallucinations that accompany auditory ones have no special diagnostic significance and may be seen in schizophrenia, mania, depression, dementia, delirium, and in other disorders. However, when visual hallucinations occur in the complete absence of auditory ones, then one is most likely dealing with a dementia, delirium, or secondary psychosis.
Tactile, or Haptic, Hallucinations
Any imaginable tactile sensation may be hallucinated. In formication, bugs may be felt crawling over the face or swarming over the body. Internal stirrings or electric sensations deep in the bowels may be felt. Burns or prickings of hundreds of needles are felt on the skin. Less commonly, tactile hallucinations may be pleasant, often sexual iature: a feeling as of soft velvet drawn across the skin, ineffable pleasures are felt, and at times orgasm may occur.
Tactile hallucinations may occur in schizophrenia, mania, depression, intoxications (especially with cocaine), and withdrawal from alcohol or sedative-hypnotics.
Olfactory Hallucinations
Patients may speak of a foul stench, “as if death.” Poisonous gas may be smelled, or sulfurous fumes “from hell.” Occasionally there may be pleasant odors, as of perfume. Such hallucinations may be seen in schizophrenia and also in simple or complex partial seizures, so-called “uncinate fits.”
Gustatory Hallucinations
Hallucinated tastes are almost always disagreeable. Food may taste rotten or putrid. Patients may experience a taste of feces.
Metallic tastes may be found in simple or complex partial seizures and may also occur in some poisonings with heavy metals.
“Hallucinations” in healthy people
It is important to note that similar phenomena may be experienced in the absence of mental disorder. These experiences have been recorded over thousands of years. In the Judeo-Christian records, God spoke to Adam on the sixth day, giving him instructions about how to behave in the Garden of Eden (Genesis, 2:16 -17). God spoke to Moses from a burning bush, and on another occasion, He dictated the Ten Commandments (Exodus, 34:27).
In the Islamic records, the Angel Gabriel spo ke to Mohammed on many occasions. On the first occasion he said, “Oh, Mohammed, of a verity thou art the prophet of God”. On subsequent occasions, over many years, the angel spoke the entire Koran to him.
Voices of secular origin have also been experienced by many prominent people. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis wrote, “During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city….I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice….” The hearing of a family member’s voice when separated from them is not uncommon among recently bereaved people and those lost in the wilderness. In such circumstances being alone and wishing to be with loved individuals appears to have greater explanatory power than supernatural factors and mental disorders.
Mahatma Gandhi, the man who almost single handedly achieved Indian independence from Britain, relied on an “inner voice” for guidance. Toward the end of his life the voice said, “You are on the right track, move neither to your left, nor right, but keep to the Pridmore S. Download of Psychiatry, Chapter 5. Last modified: March 2007 2 straight and narrow.” Others of great resolve have described similar “inner voices”, which have helped with determination and goal achievement. Healthy, average individuals may hear voices which are not of spiritual or pathological origin. Professor Henry Sidgewick conducted the “International Census of Waking Hallucinations in the Sane”, in the 1890s. Seventeen thousand people from England, Russia and Brazil were surveyed. Nearly 10% r eported they had experienced an unexplained perception; 2.9% of the total reported having heard a voice. A century later Professor Allen Tien conducted a study of 15 000 members of the general population in the USA and found that 2.3% had heard voices (Tien A, 1991). In a number of careful studies of small populations of university students the experience of hearing voices has been reported by a much higher p roportion of subjects.
Thus, healthy people may, from time to time, hear voices. Care has been takein these paragraphs to avoid calling these experiences, hallucinations, even though these experiences satisfy the technical definition.
Briefly, there are differences between the voices heard by healthy individuals and the hallucinations of those with mental disorders. In healthy individuals, the voice is usually as if from one person, speaking comprehensibly, in a helpful and comforting manner.
Auditory hallucinations in mental disorders, in contrast, often involve more than one voice, sometimes arguing, sometimes commenting about the patient, frequently making little sense, often in a threatening and frightening manner.
Illusions are perceptions that are associated with an outside stimulus, but the stimulus is wrongly interpreted. For example, lapping water may be heard as laughter. T echnically, these are not hallucinations, as they are associated with a stimulus. Illusions are frequently visual, and they are usually the result of a medical condition. The condition which most commonly causes illusions is delirium tremens (DTs), the disturbed state which can complicate alcohol withdrawal. Objec ts such as creases in bed covers may be perceived as snakes, insects or other animals. Folk law says that people in DTs see pink elephants. In clinical practice, however, small organisms are more commonly “seen”.
Fig. The Ponzo illusion may help you understand the moon illusion. Picture the two white bars as resting on the railroad tracks. In the drawing, the upper bar is the same length as the lower bar. However, because the upper bar appears to be farther away than the lower bar, we perceive it as longer. The same logic applies to the moon illusion.
Fig. Some interesting perceptual illusions. Illusions are a normal part of perception.
Other perceptual difficulties include heightened and changed perceptions. By heightened perceptions is meant sounds seem unnaturally clear, loud or intense, colours appear more brilliant or beautiful, or details of the environment seem to stand out in a particularly interesting way. By changed per ceptions is meant changes are perceived in the shape or size of people and inanimate objects in the environment. Changes may continue while the patient watches. These phenomena may occur in psychotic disorders; on occasions psychotic patients may be difficult to engage in conversation because they are concentrating on continuously changing perceptions. Patients may spend long periods looking in a mirror, watching their own face change. Heightened and changed perceptions may occur in other disorders, including the non-psychotic, anxiety disorders.
A pseudohallucination is an involuntary sensory experience vivid enough to be regarded as a hallucination, but recognised by the patient not to be the result of external stimuli. In other words, it is a hallucination that is recognized as a hallucination, as opposed to a “normal” hallucination which would be perceived as real. An example used in psychiatry is the hearing of voices which are “inside the head” according to the patient; in contrast, a hallucination would be indistinguishable to the patient from a real external stimulus, e.g. “people were talking about me”.
The term is not widely used in the psychiatric and medical fields, as it is considered ambiguous; the term nonpsychotic hallucination is preferred. Pseudohallucinations, then, are more likely to happen with a hallucinogenic drug.
A further distinction is sometimes made between pseudohallucinations and parahallucinations, the latter being a result of damage to the peripheral nervous system.
They are considered a feature of conversion disorder, somatization disorder, and dissociative disorders. Also, pseudohallucinations can occur in people with visual loss, with the typical such type being Charles Bonnet syndrome.
Pseudohallucinations can happen between dream and reality.
Closed-eye hallucinations and closed-eye visualizations (CEV) are a distinct class of hallucination. These types of hallucinations generally only occur when one’s eyes are closed or when one is in a darkened room. They are a form of phosphene. Certain users report closed-eye hallucinations under the influence of psychedelics. These are reportedly of a different nature than the “open-eye” hallucinations of the same compounds. Closed eye hallucination is directly related to a chronic type. Levels of CEV perception
There are five known levels of CEV perception which can be achieved either through chemical stimuli or through meditative relaxation techniques. Level 1 and 2 are very common, and often happen every day. It is still normal to experience level 3, and even level 4, but only a small percentage of the population do this without psychedelic drugs, meditation or extensive visualization training.
Level 1: Visual noise
CEV noise simulation
The most basic form of CEV perception that can be immediately experienced iormal waking consciousness involves a seemingly random noise of pointillistic light/dark regions with no apparent shape or order.
This can be seen when the eyes are closed and looking at the back of the eyelids. In a bright room, a dark red can be seen, owing to a small amount of light penetrating the eyelids and taking on the color of the blood within them. In a dark room, blackness can be seen or the object can be more colourful. But in either case it is not a flat unchanging redness/blackness. Instead, if actively observed for a few minutes, one becomes aware of an apparent disorganized motion, a random field of lightness/darkness that overlays the redness/blackness of your closed eyelids.
For a person who tries to actively observe this closed-eye perception on a regular basis, there comes a point where if he or she looks at a flat-shaded object with his or her eyes wide open, and tries to actively look for this visual noise, he or she will become aware of it and see the random pointillistic disorganized motion as if it were a translucent overlay on top of what is actually being seen by his or her open eyes.
When seen overlaid onto the physical world, this CEV noise does not obscure physical vision at all, and in fact is hard to notice if the visual field is highly patterned, complex, or in motion. When active observation is stopped, it is not obvious or noticeable, and seemingly disappears from normal physical perception. Individuals suffering from visual snow see similar noise but experience difficulty blocking it from conscious perception.
The noise probably originates from thermal noise exciting the photoreceptor cells in the retina; compare Eigengrau.
Level 2: Light/dark flashes
Some mental control can be exerted over these closed-eye visualizations, but it usually requires a bit of relaxation and concentration to achieve. When properly relaxed it is possible to cause regions of intense black, bright white or even colors such as yellow, green, or pink to appear in the noise. These regions can span the entire visual field, but seem to be fleeting iature.
Level 3: Patterns, motion, and color
CEV pattern simulation. Note that this can be quite different from real life experience
This level is relatively easily accessible to people who use LSD, and appears to be what most people refer to as colourful visuals.
However, it is also accessible to people involved in deep concentration for long. When lying down at night and closing the eyes, right before sleep the complex motion of these patterns can become directly visible without any great effort thanks to hypnagogic hallucination. The patterns themselves might resemble fractals.
Level 4: Objects and things
This is a fairly deep state. At this level, thoughts visually manifest as objects or environments. When this level is reached, the CEV noise seems to calm down and fade away, leaving behind an intense flat ordered blackness. The visual field becomes a sort of active space. A side component of this is the ability to feel motion when the eyes are closed.
Some paranormal researchers believe that remote places can be viewed in this state and have named it remote viewing.
Opening the eyes returns one to the normal physical world, but still with the CEV object field overlaid onto it and present. In this state it is possible to see things that appear to be physical objects in the open-eye physical world, but that aren’t really there.
Level 5: Overriding physical perception
If inducing by drugs or mental disease, this is the point where it appears to the outside world that a person is either unconscious or insane. The internal CEV perceptions and think-it/feel-it perceptions become stronger than physical perceptions, and completely override and replace open-eye physical perceptions. This can be a potentially dangerous state if a person is still mobile while in a different imagined world, but by this time most people are motionless and not likely to do something hazardous to themselves or others. This is the point where most hallucinogenic references say it is a good idea to have a “sitter” present to watch over the person using the chemicals, and keep them from accidentally harming themselves or others while deep into their own world.
This level can be entered from complete sensory deprivation, as experienced in an isolation tank, but even there it requires great relaxation.
According to lucid dreaming researcher Stephen LaBerge, perceptions can come from either the senses or imagination. A inhibitory system involving in the thalamus, likely involving serotonergic neurons, inhibits imaginary perceptions from becoming too activated so they turn into hallucinations. This system is inhibited during REM sleep, and the imagination can freely run into the perceptual systems. What happens at level 5 is likely that this system is inhibited, just like in REM sleep, by different causes like sensory deprivation, psychedelic drugs or meditative relaxation techniques.
What is not a CEV
Image burn-in (afterimage)
Image burn-in occurs when very bright objects lie in one’s field of vision, and should not be confused with closed-eye hallucinations. Visual burn-in from bright lights is visible for a few minutes after closing the eyes, or by blinking repeatedly, but the burn-in effect slowly fades away as the retina recovers, whereas the waking-consciousness CEV noise will not disappear if observed continuously over a period of time.
Corneal liquid
CEV does not involve the liquid and air bubbles on the surface of the cornea, which can also be seen by extremely nearsighted people when looking at bright point-light sources with glasses/contacts removed. Also called “Floaters” – often appear as cells floating across the eye. Half-closing and reopening the eyelids creates a very definite wiper-ridge in the corneal liquid that is readily visible. Fully closing and reopening the eyelids also stirs up the corneal liquid which settles down after a brief moment. The motion of waking-consciousness CEV noise is not so directly and physically controllable and repeatable. This is not necessarily only associated with extreme nearsightedness.
Blue-sky sprites
CEV does not seem to be related to the “sprites” (blue field entoptic phenomenon) that can be seen as dots darting around when staring up into a bright blue sky on a sunny day (not looking at the sun). These dots superimposed over a flat blue background are white blood cells moving through the blood vessels of the retina. The motion of waking-consciousness CEV noise is uniformly random compared to the waking-consciousness blue-sky sprite motion.
Physical retinal stimulation
CEV is unrelated to the visual noise seen when the retina is physically stimulated. The retina can be made to produce light patterns of visual noise simply by one rubbing their eyes somewhat forcefully in a manner that increases intraocular pressure. Additionally retinal noise can be produced by touching near the rear of the eyeball (for example, if one closes their eyes, looks all the way left, and lightly touches the rightmost part of the eye socket, this produces visual noise in the shape of a circle that appears at the left side of the visual field – a practice that is neither painful nor dangerous). None of these are closed-eye hallucinations.
Memory
Human memory, like memory in a computer, allows us to store information for later use. In order to do this, however, both the computer and we need to master three processes involved in memory. The first is called encoding; the process we use to transform information so that it can be stores. For a computer this means transferring data into 1’s and 0’s. For us, it means transforming the data into a meaningful form such as an association with an existing memory, an image, or a sound.
Next is the actual storage, which simply means holding onto the information. For this to take place, the computer must physically write the
The major difference between humans and computers in terms of memory has to do with how the information is stored. For the most part, computers have only two types; permanent storage and permanent deletion. Humans, on the other hand are more complex in that we have three distinct memory storage capabilities (not including permanent deletion). The first is Sensory memory, referring to the information we receive through the senses. This memory is very brief lasting only as much as a few seconds.
Short Term Memory (STM) takes over when the information in our sensory memory is transferred to our consciousness or our awareness (Engle, Cantor, & Carullo, 1993; Laming, 1992). This is the information that is currently active such as reading this page, talking to a friend, or writing a paper. Short term memory can definitely last longer than sensory memory (up to 30 seconds or so), but it still has a very limited capacity. According to research, we can remember approximately 5 to 9 (7 +/- 2) bits of information in our short term memory at any given time (Miller, 1956)
If STM lasts only up to 30 seconds, how do we ever get any work done? Wouldn’t we start to lose focus or concentrate about twice every minute? This argument prompted researchers to look at a second phase of STM that is now referred to as Working Memory. Working Memory is the process that takes place when we continually focus on material for longer than STM alone will allow (Baddeley, 1992).
What happens when our short term memory is full and another bit of information enters? Displacement means that the new information will push out part of the old information. Suddenly some one says the area code for that phone number and almost instantly you forget the last two digits of the number. We can further sharpen our short term memory skills, however, by mastering chunking and using rehearsal (which allows us to visualize, hear, say, or even see the information repeatedly and through different senses).
Finally, there is long term memory (LTM), which is most similar to the permanent storage of a computer. Unlike the other two types, LTM is relatively permanent and practically unlimited in terms of its storage capacity. Its been argued that we have enough space in our LTM to memorize every phone number in the U.S. and still functioormally in terms of remembering what we do now. Obviously we don’t use even a fraction of this storage space.
There are several subcategories of LTM. First, memories for facts, life events, and information about our environment are stored in declarative memory. This includes semantic memory, factual knowledge like the meaning of words, concepts, and our ability to do math (Lesch & Pollatsek, 1993, Rohrer et al., 1995) and episodic memory, memories for events and situations (Goldringer, 1996; Kliegel & Lindberger, 1993). The second subcategory is ofteot thought of as memory because it refers to internal, rather than external information. When you brush your teeth, write your name, or scratch your eye, you do this with ease because you previously stored these movements and can recall them with ease. This is referred to as nondeclarative (or implicit) memory. These are memories we have stored due to extensive practice, conditioning, or habits.
Why We Remember What We Remember
Short Term Memory. There are typically six reasons why information is stored in our short term memory.
1. primacy effect – information that occurs first is typically remembered better than information occurring later. When given a list of words or numbers, the first word or number is usually remembered due to rehearsing this more than other information.
2. recency effect – often the last bit of information is remembered better because not as much time has past; time which results in forgetting.
3. distinctiveness – if something stands out from information around it, it is often remembered better. Any distinctive information is easier to remember than that which is similar, usual, or mundane.
4. frequency effect – rehearsal, as stated in the first example, results in better memory. Remember trying to memorize a formula for your math class. The more you went over it, the better you knew it.
5. associations – when we associate or attach information to other information it becomes easier to remember. Many of us use this strategy in our professions and everyday life in the form of acronyms.
6. reconstruction – sometimes we actually fill in the blanks in our memory. In other words, when trying to get a complete picture in our minds, we will make up the missing parts, often without any realization that this is occurring.
Long Term Memory. Information that passes from our short term to our long term memory is typically that which has some significance attached to it. Imagine how difficult it would be to forget the day you graduated, or your first kiss. Now think about how easy it is to forget information that has no significance; the color of the car you parked next to at the store or what shirt you wore last Thursday. When we process information, we attach significance to it and information deemed important is transferred to our long term memory.
There are other reasons information is transferred. As we all know, sometimes our brains seem full of insignificant facts. Repetition plays a role in this, as we tend to remember things more the more they are rehearsed. Other times, information is transferred because it is somehow attached to something significant. You may remember that it was a warm day when you bought your first car. The temperature really plays no important role, but is attached to the memory of buying your first car.
Forgetting
You can’t talk about remembering without mentioning its counterpart. It seems that as much as we do remember, we forget even more. Forgetting isn’t really all that bad, and is in actuality, a pretty natural phenomenon. Imagine if you remembered every minute detail of every minute or every hour, of every day during your entire life, no matter how good, bad, or insignificant. Now imagine trying to sift through it all for the important stuff like where you left your keys.
There are many reasons we forget things and often these reasons overlap. Like in the example above, some informatioever makes it to LTM. Other times, the information gets there, but is lost before it can attach itself to our LTM. Other reasons include decay, which means that information that is not used for an extended period of time decays or fades away over time. It is possible that we are physiologically preprogrammed to eventually erase data that no longer appears pertinent to us.
Failing to remember something doesn’t mean the information is gone forever though. Sometimes the information is there but for various reasons we can’t access it. This could be caused by distractions going on around us or possibly due to an error of association (e.g., believing something about the data which is not correct causing you to attempt to retrieve information that is not there). There is also the phenomenon of repression, which means that we purposefully (albeit subconsciously) push a memory out of reach because we do not want to remember the associated feelings. This is often sited in cases where adults ‘forget’ incidences of sexual abuse when they were children. And finally, amnesia, which can be psychological or physiological in origin.
Intelligence
The assessment of human abilities dates back nearly 4000 years when China used written tests to rate applicants for civil service. Two-thousand years later, during the Hans Dynasty, civil service type exams were used in the areas of law, military, agriculture, and geography. In the early 1800s British diplomats observed the Chinese assessments and modified them for use in Britain and eventually the United States for use in civil service placement.
Sir Francis Galton is a key figure in modern intelligence testing. As the first cousin of Charles Darwin, he attempted to apply Darwin’s evolutionary theory to the study of human abilities. He postulate that intelligence was quantifiable and normally distributed. In other words, he believed that we could assign a score to intelligence where the majority of people fall in the average range and the percentage of the population decreases the farther from the middle their score gets.
The first workable intelligence test was developed by French psychologist Alfred Binet. He and his partner, Theodore Simon, were commissioned by the French government to improve the teaching methods for developmentally disabled children. They believed that intelligence was the key to effective teaching, and developed a strategy whereby a mental age (MA) was determined and divided by the child’s chronological age (CA). This formula, stated as “MA/CA X 100.”
Another theorist, Raymond Cattell, described intelligence as having two distinct factors. The first he called Crystallized Intelligence, representing acquired knowledge, and second, Fluid Intelligence, or our ability to use this knowledge.
Sternberg (1988) argued that there are a number of ways to demonstrate intelligence or adaptive functioning. He proposed a model of intelligence referred to as the triarchic theory. According to this model there are three types of intelligence: (1) analytical, or the ability to solve a problem by looking at its components; (2) creative, the ability o use new or ingenious ways to solve problems; and (3) practical, referring to street smarts or common sense. While most IQ tests measure only analytical intelligence, they fail to include practical intelligence which is the most understandable to most of us (Sternberg et al., 1995)
Intelligence is not something we can see or hear, or taste. We can see the results of intelligence…sometimes. Many argue that quantifying intelligence correctly is impossible and all that modern IQ tests do is test our knowledge and abilities. While it is true that a person can learn to improve his or her score, this can only occur if correct responses are taught to the person, which is highly unethical. We have also found that our individual IQ score remains quite consistent as we get older. Some argue, however, that modern IQ tests are prejudiced against certain ethnicities and cultures and tend to result in higher scores for others. Where this leaves us, however, is uncertain. As of today, these IQ tests are the best we have in our attempt to quantify the construct known as intelligence.
Memory disorders and aging
Normal aging, although not responsible for causing memory disorders, is associated with a decline in cognitive and neural systems including memory (long-term and working memory). Many factors such as genetics and neural degeneration have a part in causing memory disorders. In order to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease and dementia early, researchers are trying to find biological markers that can predict these diseases in younger adults. One such marker is a beta-amyloid deposit which is a protein that deposits on the brain as we age. Although 20-33% of healthy elderly adults have these deposits, they are increased in elderly with diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
Additionally, traumatic brain injury, TBI, is increasingly being linked as a factor in early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
One study examined dementia severity in elderly schizophrenic patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia versus elderly schizophrenic patients without any neurodegenerative disorders. In most cases, if schizophrenia is diagnosed, Alzheimer’s disease or some form of dementia in varying levels of severity is also diagnosed. It was found that increased hippocampal neurofibrillary tangles and higher neuritic plaque density (in the superior temporal gyrus, orbitofrontal gyrus, and the inferior parietal cortex) were associated with increased severity of dementia. Along with these biological factors, when the patient also had the apolipoprotein E (ApoE4) allele (a known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease), the neuritic plaques increased although the hippocampal neurofibrillary tangles did not. It showed an increased genetic susceptibility to more severe dementia with Alzheimer’s disease than without the genetic marker.
As seen in the examples above, although memory does degenerate with age, it is not always classified as a memory disorder. The difference in memory betweeormal aging and a memory disorder is the amount of beta-amyloid deposits, hippocampal neurofibrillary tangles, or neuritic plaques in the cortex. If there is an increased amount, memory connections become blocked, memory functions decrease much more than what is normal for that age and a memory disorder is diagnosed.
The cholinergic hypothesis of geriatric memory dysfunction is an older hypothesis that was considered before beta-amyloid deposits, neurofibrillary tangles, or neuritic plaques. It states that by blocking the cholinergic mechanisms in control subjects you can examine the relationship between cholinergic dysfunction and normal aging and memory disorders because this system when dysfunctional creates memory deficits.
Memory disorders can range from mild to severe, but they all result from some kind of neurological damage to the structures of the brain, thus hindering the storage, retention and recollection of memories.
Memory disorders can be progressive, like Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s disease, or immediate, like those resulting from traumatic head injury. Most disorders are exacerbated by the effects of ageing, which remains the single greatest risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases in general.
Research and analysis of individual case studies of memory disorders (including cases such as “A.J.”, “H.M.”, “K.C.” and Clive Wearing) have yielded many important insights into how human memory works, although much more work remains to be done. In recent years, neuro-imaging techniques such as MRI, CAT and PET scans have also aided in the analysis of how memory disorders affect the brain physiologically and neurologically.
AMNESIA
Amnesia is the general term for a condition in which memory (either stored memories or the process of committing something to memory) is disturbed or lost, to a greater extent than simple everyday forgetting or absent-mindedness. Amnesia may result either from organic or neurological causes (damage to the brain through physical injury, neurological disease or the use of certain drugs), or from functional or psychogenic causes (psychological factors, such as mental disorder, post-traumatic stress or psychological defence mechanisms).
There are two main types of amnesia: anterograde amnesia (where the ability to memorize new things is impaired or lost because data does not transfer successfully from the conscious short-term memory into permanent long-term memory); and retrograde amnesia (where a person’s pre-existing memories are lost to conscious recollection, beyond an ordinary degree of forgetfulness, even though they may be able to memorize new things that occur after the onset of amnesia). Anterograde amnesia is the more common of the two. Sometimes both these types of amnesia may occur together, sometimes called total or global amnesia. Another type of amnesia is post-traumatic amnesia, a state of confusion and memory loss that occurs after a traumatic brain injury. Amnesia which occurs due to psychological factors is usually referred to as psychogenic amnesia.
Many kinds of amnesia are associated with damage to the hippocampus and related areas of the brain which are used in the encoding, storage and retrieval of memories. If there is a blockage in the pathways along which information travels during the processes of memory encoding or retrieval, or if whole regions of the brain are missing or damaged, then the brain may not be able to form new memories or retrieve some old ones.
The usual causes of amnesia are lesions to the brain from an accident or neurological disease, but intense stress, alcohol abuse, loss of oxygen or blood flow to the brain, etc, can all also cause amnesia, as sometimes can treatments such as electro-convulsive therapy. For example, intense stress can cause the sympathetic nervous system to activate the adrenal glands, which then secrete certain hormones into the bloodstream which can significantly affect the plasticity of the brain’s neurons (i.e. their ability to change and strengthen connections), especially those in the hippocampus.
In most cases, amnesia is a temporary condition, lasting from a few seconds to a few hours, but the duration can be longer depending on the severity of the disease or trauma, up to a few weeks or even months. Although it is very rare for anyone to experience total (permanent) amnesia, one well-known case of long-lasting and acute total (retrograde and anterograde) amnesia, perhaps the worst case of amnesia ever recorded, is that of the British musician Clive Wearing, who suffered damage to his brain as a result of an encephalitis virus in 1985. Because the damage was to an area of his brain required to transfer memories from working memory to long-term memory, he is completely unable to form lasting new long-term memories, and his memory is therefore limited to a short-term memory of between 7 and 30 seconds, to the extent that he will greet his wife like a long-lost friend even if she only left to go into the kitchen 30 seconds ago. However, Wearing still recalls how to play the piano and conduct a choir, despite having no recollection of having received a musical education, because his procedural memory was not damaged by the virus.
In general, memories of habits (procedural memory) are usually better preserved than memories of facts and events (declarative memory), and the most distant long-term memories, such as those of childhood, are more likely to be preserved. When memories return, older memories are usually recalled first, and then more recent memories, until almost all memory is recovered.
Retrograde amnesia is a form of amnesia where someone is unable to recall events that occurred before the development of the amnesia, even though they may be able to encode and memorize new things that occur after the onset.
Retrograde amnesia usually follows damage to areas of the brain other than the hippocampus (the part of the brain involved in encoding new memories), because already exisiting long-term memories are stored in the neurons and synapses of various different brain regions. For example, damage to Broca’s or Wernicke’s areas of the brain, which are specifically linked to speech production and language information, would probably cause language-related memory loss. It usually results from damage to the brain regions most closely associated with declarative (and particularly episodic) memory, such as the temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex. The damage may result from a cranial trauma (a blow to the head), a cerebrovascular accident or stroke (a burst artery in the brain), a tumour (if it presses against part of the brain), hypoxia (lack of oxygen in the brain), certain kinds of encephalitis, chronic alcoholism, etc.
Typically, episodic memory is more severely affected than semantic memory, so that the patient may remember words and general knowledge (such as who their country’s leader is, how everyday objects work, colours, etc) but not specific events in their lives. Procedural memories (memory of skills, habits and how to perform everyday fucntions) are typically not affected at all.
Retrograde amnesia is often temporally graded, meaning that remote memories are more easily accessible than events occurring just prior to the trauma (sometimes known as Ribot’s Law after the 19th Century psychologist Thйodule-Armand Ribot), and the events nearest in time to the event that caused the memory loss may never be recovered. This is because the neural pathways of newer memories are not as strong as older ones that have been strengthened by years of retrieval and re-consolidation. While there is no actual cure for retrograde amnesia, “jogging” the victim’s memory by exposing them to significant articles from their past will often speed the rate of recall.
Anterograde amnesia is the loss of the ability to create new memories, leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the recent past, even though long-term memories from before the event which caused the amnesia remain intact. Sufferers may therefore repeat comments or questions several times, for example, or fail to recognize people they met just minutes before.
Anterograde amnesia may be drug-induced (several benzodiazepines are known to have powerful amnesic effects, and alcohol intoxication also has a similar effect) or it follows a traumatic brain injury or surgery in which there is damage to the hippocampus or medial temporal lobe of the brain, or an acute event such as a concussion, a heart attack, oxygen deprivation or an epileptic attack. Less commonly, it can also be caused by shock or an emotional disorder.
Research shows that anterograde amnesia results from a failure of memory encoding and storage. New information is processed normally, but almost immediately forgotten, never making it into the regions of the brain where long-term memories are stored. More specifically, in normal use, neurons in the mammillary bodies of the hypothalamus make connections with the thalamus, which in turn makes connections with the cortex of the brain, where long-term memories are stored. Anterograde amnesia can therefore result from damage to the hypothalamus and thalamus and the surrounding cortical structures, so that encoded memories are never stored since connections between hippocampus and cortex are disrupted.
Usually, sufferers from anterograde amnesia lose declarative memory (the recollection of facts), but they retaion-declarative, or procedural, memory (the learning of skills and habits). For instance, they may be able to remember or learn how to do things, such as talking on the phone or riding a bicycle, but they may not remember what they had eaten for lunch earlier that day. This is because procedural memory does not rely on the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe memory system in the same way as declarative memory. There have, however, been cases where anterograde amnesia patients lose only the episodic part of their declarative memory (that part which relates to autobiographical information with a temporal and/or spatial context), and not the semantic part (factual information, such as language, history, geography, etc, with autobiographical association).
When there is damage to just one side of the medial temporal lobe, the neuroplasticity of the brain (its ability to re-map its neural connections wheecessary) can often allow the opportunity for normal, or near-normal, functioning for memories with time.
Psychogenic amnesia, also known as functional amnesia or dissociative amnesia, is a disorder characterized by abnormal memory functioning in the absence of structural brain damage or a knoweurobiological cause. It results from the effects of severe stress or psychological trauma on the brain, rather than from any physical or physiological cause. It is often considered to be equivalent to the clinical condition known as repressed memory syndrome.
There are two main types of psychogenic amnesia: global amnesia and situation-specific amnesia. Global amnesia, also known as fugue state, refers to a sudden loss of personal identity lasting a few hours or days, often accompanied by severe stress or depression and often involving extended periods of wandering and confusion. It is very rare, and usually resolves over time (although memory of the fugue episode itself may remain lost), often helped by therapy. Situation-specific amnesia is a type of psychogenic amnesia that occurs as a result of a severely stressful event, as part of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to any event that results in psychological trauma, which manifests itself in constant re-experiencing of the original trauma through flashbacks or nightmares and avoidance of any stimuli associated with the trauma, as well as increased arousal (such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, anger and hypervigilance).
It is most commonly associated with traumatic events or violent experiences involving emotional shock, such as being mugged or raped or involved in car crash. Those at increased risk include those sexually or physically abused during childhood, those who have experienced domestic violence, natural disasters, terrorist acts, etc, soldiers who have experienced combat, and essentially anyone who has experienced any sufficiently severe psychological stress, internal conflict or intolerable life situation.
Freudian psychology suggests that psychogenic amnesia is an act of self-preservation, where the alternative might be overwhelming anxiety or even suicide. Unpleasant, unwanted or psychologically dangerous memories are repressed or blocked from entering the consciousness as a kind of subconscious self-censorship, but they remain in the unconscious. Neurologically, normal autobiographical memory processing is blocked by an imbalance of stress hormones such as glucocorticoids and mineralocorticoids in the brain, particularly in the regions of the limbic system involved in memory processing.
Such repressed memories may be recovered spontaneously, years or decades after the event, triggered by a particular smell, taste or other identifier. Because it is due to psychological rather than physiological causes, psychogenic amnesia can also sometimes be helped by therapy. Repressed memories may be accessed by psychotherapy, hypnotism or other techniques, although it is often difficult to distinguish a true repressed memory from a false one without corroborating evidence.
Those who suffer from psychogenic amnesia tend to lose their biographical or episodic memories, (to the extent of not even being able to remember their owames and addresses), particularly of the events leading up to the trigger event, but usually preserve their semantic and procedural memories, and the ability to create new memories. Episodes of psychogenic amnesia can last from a few hours to several days, or sometimes even months, although severe cases are very rare. Because it is due to psychological rather than physiological causes, it can sometimes be helped by therapy.
The constant remembering and re-imagining of traumatic events causes them to be reinforced and re-consolidated time after time, and the memory is so strong and realistic that it is encoded almost as a new current event each time, rather than as an old memory. Thus, the memories need to be “re-filed” in their proper place (in the past), and recent advances in the understanding of neuroplasticity (the brain‘s ability to rewire and reconfigure itself) have led to some promising treatments. One example is the use of beta blockers, such as propanolol, while repeatedly reading a detailed account of the traumatic event, thus chemically blocking neurons so that, over time, the account becomes just another story without the old traumatic personal associations.
Confabulation is a memory disturbance characterized by information that appears to be made up rather than true. Confabulation is distinguished from lying as there is no intent to deceive and the person is unaware the information is false. Although individuals can present blatantly false information, confabulation can also seem to be coherent, internally consistent, and relatively normal. Individuals who confabulate present incorrect memories ranging from “subtle alternations to bizarre fabrications”, and are generally very confident about their recollections, despite contradictory evidence. Most known causes of confabulation are caused by brain damage or dementias, such as alcoholism, aneurysm or Alzheimer’s disease.
Two distinct types of confabulation are often distinguished: spontaneous and provoked.
Spontaneous, or primary, confabulations do not occur in response to a cue and seem to be involuntary. Spontaneous confabulation is relatively rare, may result from the interaction between frontal lobe pathology and organic amnesia, and is more common in cases of dementia.
Provoked, momentary, or secondary, confabulation represents a normal response to a faulty memory and is common in both amnesia and dementia. Provoked confabulations can become apparent during memory tests. Another distinction found in confabulations is that between verbal and behavioral. Verbal confabulations are spoken false memories and are more common, while behavioral confabulations occur when an individual acts on their false memories.[6] Confabulated memories of all types most often occur in autobiographical memory, and are indicative of a complicated and intricate process that can be led astray at any point during encoding, storage, or recall of a memory. This type of confabulation is commonly seen in Korsakoff’s syndrome.
A blackout is a phenomenon caused by the intake of an alcoholic beverage or other substance in which long term memory creation is impaired or there is a complete inability to recall the past. Blackouts are frequently described as having effects similar to that of anterograde amnesia, in which the subject cannot recall any events after the event that caused amnesia. ‘Blacking out’ is not to be confused with the mutually exclusive act of ‘passing out‘, which means loss of consciousness. Research on alcohol blackouts was begun by E. M. Jellinek in the 1940s. Using data from a survey of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) members, he came to believe that blackouts would be a good determinant of alcoholism. However, there are conflicting views as to whether this is true. The negative psychological effects of an alcohol-related blackout are often worsened by those who suffer from anxiety disorders.
Fragmentation of memory is a memory disorder, in which patient is unable to organize memories in space or/and time. The impaired person can remember things, but cannot pinpoint when the events happened, and has poor sense of time – personal timeline is distorted, months, or even years are confused even for relatively recent events.
The impaired person usually suffers from physical damage or underdevelopment of hippocampus. It may be a genetic disorder, or consequence of some traumatic disorder, like PTSD. Dysfunctional brain often has other related consequences, like oversensitivity to some stimuli, impulsiveness, lack of direction in life, sometimes aggressiveness and distorted perception of self and ability to truly empathize with others, which is usually masked on the first sight.
Many times there is a link between dissociative disorders and memory fragmentation. Two common dissociative disorders in which fragmentation of memory caormally be found are: Dissociative Amnesia – Not to be confused with general amnesia where the sufferer is unable to recall whole periods of time as short as a couple weeks or months all the way up to years, dissociative amnesia is much more common than the general type of the disorder. With the dissociative version of the disorder there is a failure to recall specific events, normally events that were accompanied by some sort of trauma. The disorder also branches out into the emotional state of the mind upon experiencing trauma. Meaning that at times the person will be able to remember the specifics of the events (date, time, location, people involved etc.) but the strong emotional ties to the experience is what becomes fragmented in the creation of the memory. Dissociative Fugue – This disorder normally revolves around a specific trip taken by the person suffering from the disorder. They can travel great distances and not remember the trip. These unremembered trips are normally the result of the individual trying to escape an unbearable situation and many times while traveling the person unknowingly suffers some degree of identity distortion or at times assuming a completely new identity. One of the unique characteristics of this disorder is that upon completing the trip the individual normally remembers the trip and all the details associated with it but while the events are happening there is no recollection of time passing or where they physically are.
