Alright, now this week is all about one of my favorite topics, and that's memory. And I want to actually tell you all sorts of fascinating things about memory, think about how it fits into the courtroom and, and various other situations. But first, very first thing I want to do, is try to convince you that the way we use the word memory is all wrong. Okay. So let's start with that. All right. Week 5, Lecture 1. And I've, I've entitled it memory is not a singular noun. what I really want to highlight in this lecture, especially is the singular part. Next lecture, I'll talk a little bit more about the noun part. But in terms of, you know, when we talk about memory with each other, we will say things like, my memory is bad. which is kind of like saying, you know, my bed is lumpy, it's uncomfortable. It's implying that memory. Whatever that concept is, is kind of like a noun, like a thing, like a bed. However, it's not. and again, it's not on either front. It's not a single thing like a bed, and it's not a single thing like a bed. So I'm going to focus on the single part in this lecture. And what I want to really highlight for you, is the fact that, with respect to human memory, we actually have multiple systems that we draw on at different times, depending on what the situation demands. So let's start a little bit of the tour of the different kinds of memory, to show you that there are multiple kinds. So let's start over here with Episodic memory. Now this is in fact, what most of us think about, or this is what we think we're referring to, when we use the word memory. Most of the time, at least. It's our ability to replay previous experiences in our mind. At least, it feels like we're replaying previous experiences. As you'll find out. The, what's actually going on in your mind is certainly not an exact replication of that experience. It's a distorted one, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. Let's just think about the situation. So let me ask you, what did you have for supper last night? Give you a few seconds, it's deceptively hard to answer that question sometimes. What you probably found though, is that you didn't only get the answer to that question, you probably had a little replay in your mind of the event. Who you were there with you know, maybe even what you discussed, maybe the room you were in, you probably kind of saw the event replayed in your mind. An episode, a previous episode. That's what we mean by episodic memory. So this person is remembering being a young girl and playing that memory card game, for instance. so often, if I ask you, you know, tell me about your trip to Jamaica. Or what did you do yesterday? I'm asking you about your episodic memory. But, there's first of all a different sort of memory that's related to episodic memory which we call semantic memory. So let me ask you a question and see how this feels different. What is seven times six? Hopefully, most of you could get that. that question. What you probably found, at least if you're very, if you're pretty good at math, the number 42 just came to mind. You probably did not replay and relive some episode of learning that information. It just came to mind. Let's try another one. What's the capital city of Paris? That didn't make sense, did it? [LAUGH] I mixed that up. I'm sorry. I meant to say the capital city of France, but let's try another one. What's the capital city of England? Okay. again, hopefully the, the name London just comes to mind. But you probably don't have that same replaying of experience. And one of the things that seems to happen is that, if we come in contact with some piece of information across multiple contexts. Then we start not remembering the context anymore and just remembering the information. So, you know, this is kind of like the education system is trying to stick all these facts into your mind. And the hope is, if you hear these things over and over again, and you read about them and you experience them in different contexts, eventually you will just know them. They will just be a part of your storehouse of knowledge. Things that you know. And we call that semantic memory. So, semantic and episodic are different. You can know things without that whole episode, but sometimes we have the whole episode. So, those are the primary systems we use to store information in our minds. There's another system called procedural memory that we use to store skills. And it actually works quite differently. the first time that we, most of us have encountered this was tying shoes. Had to learn that fancy little trick you have to play to tie the shoe, so your hands have to figure that out and at first we're very bad. We need a lot of guidance. We do it over, and over, and over again and slowly, we get better, and better, and better, and better. And we reach a point, where it's in fact, that's very hard to even know what we're even doing anymore. Our hands just kind of do it. So for example, if you suddenly find yourself as the person trying to teach someone how to tie their shoes. Quite often you don't know, you can't just tell someone. Now try it right now, you know. Try to pause for a second and explain verbally what you're doing with those strings. You probably don't even know. You just do it. and in fact, if you had to teach someone, you would probably have to watch yourself, and consciously figure out, what are my hands doing? Before you could explain it. So you also see this, of course, with musical instruments. At first, it's very hard to play. But eventually, somebody can play those instruments. And they have, they don't even have to use their mind very, pretty much. It's, it's what we sometimes call muscle memory. It just kind of happens. Now, it is memory, right? Because it's previous experience. Affecting your current behavior, and that's really how a psychologist defines memory. so with procedural memory, you can't just be exposed to the information. I sometimes tell people, you know, imagine someone came and talked to you about karate for two hours. You would learn a lot. Your episodic memory and your semantic memory might actually get some of that information about karate. But you still couldn't do karate. In order to do it, and to do it well, you have to practice it. You have to do it over and over and over and over. Either way. Some of the cognitive skills I feel passionate about, critical thinking, creative thinking, I think they work the same way as well. You need practice with them. You need to work at them over and over, but eventually, if you work enough, it becomes natural, like playing the piano. It just happens. It's part of what you can do. Not what you know, what you can do. And there's a whole other memory system underlying that procedural memory, okay? So, we have two systems for information. We have one system for skills, things you can do. And then there's another system which could be the most important of them all. which is sometimes called working memory. Or you and I might think of it as consciousness. So, let me let you feel it. Okay? Here we go. This feels a little game showy, but here's a question. How high can you reach sitting on a camel? Alright, if I asked you that what goes through your mind? I know for me, this is what's going through my mind. And, and, and let me stress mind. Because that's what we're going to actually talk about now. This conscious experience in our head. And in that conscious experience, what happens with me is, I would think okay, let me see. I went to the zoo once and I saw some camels. an episodic memory. I'm re-experiencing that. How tall were the camels? Well, they were maybe at about eye height on their back. where I would sit, And I'm six foot three. I know you can't really tell, but I'm six foot three. So that might be about six feet tall at the back of a camel. Okay. So now, if I were sitting on it, how much taller could I reach? Well as I told you I'm six foot three, and I happen to know my inseam from buying jeans, that is I know how long my legs are up to my butt. They're about 36 inches. Yeah, I'm a bit of a freak that way, I'm afraid. so three foot of legs. So let's just lop that right off me, and then that leaves about three foot three. from my, from my butt to the top of my head. So, I add that to the six foot, and I'm up about nine foot three now. How high can I reach above my head? Well, I might look and say, hm, that looks like maybe another two or three feet. So, I'm suspecting nine foot three, two or three feet, I could reach about 11 or 12 feet high. Okay. Now, the important part here is notice what I was doing. I was pulling information from episodic memory. my visit to the zoo. I was pulling information from semantic memory. My inseam, how, how long my legs are. And I was putting that stuff together, sometimes with new information, just thinking about how high I can reach. Maybe I never thought about that before, but I can estimate that. And I put all that information together and I end up with an answer to this question. Okay? The system that we use to do that is sometimes called working memory. Working because, as you can feel, it's doing a lot of stuff. It's pulling information together, and it's trying to do so to solve a novel problem. Now, it doesn't just have to be that sort of abstract stuff. You've probably felt some of this. Working memory is assumed to have both a spatial and a verbal component to it. So let me give you a sense of that. Here's another question. Think of some small building that you know well, so maybe a house if you grew up in a small house. How many windows did it have? Alright. Pay attention to what happens in your mind while you, while you answer that. What you're probably, one of two things is probably happening in your mind. Either you're imagining yourself outside of that building and you see it in front of you. And you can count the windows, and then you can walk around to the other side and count the windows. Or maybe you're doing the same thing, but you're first going inside the building and counting from the inside out, walking from room to room, in your mind. The point of this is that, that's part of working memory too. And that's a very visual, sometimes called visual spacial scratch pad. It's a very visual sense. You can produce images in your mind, and you can work with them to solve problems. Now of course you can also use sounds, not just images. Here's a couple of examples. First one, finish the sentence. Keep on rockin in the, okay, I'm a Neil Young fan. Neil Young's a, a, a great Canadian singer songwriter and just cool interesting odd dude. he's got that song, keep on rockin in the free world. Okay for some of you, you might have just heard that continue. Free world. which is words, right? And you can hear those words in your head. In fact, we often hear and have conversations with ourselves in our head. That's working memory. it's not just words, so I'm just asking, hear a cuckoo sound in your head. I can do that. I assume you can do that, as well. you know, just to show you, you can have sounds in your, in your head, too. You can imagine the sound of a tractor, you can imagine the sound of a bell maybe an airplane taking off, a, a train whistle. You know, we can imagine these sounds as well. So, all of these parts, when people talk about working memory, they often say, okay, here's the outside world, and the outside world brings things in. And those, and those could be questions, like the ones I asked you. it could be various sensory input of various sorts. And then you have the ability to use that information to solve problems. So that is almost every moment of our day we have some goal. We have something we'd like to accomplish. even when that goal is just relaxing, just chilling out and relaxing, we have a goal, and we find ourselves in some situation. So we have information from the real world, we have information from long-term memory, and we have these two things I just told you about, a visual-spatial scratchpad if we want to do imagery kind of stuff, and various sounds, a phonological store with sounds and, and voices that we can use. And working memory is somehow the place that brings these all together. There's this term called the central executive. It's always a tricky term in psychology. because it starts to feel like there's a little man in our head. And, and we don't like that, as scientists. But there is this notion that, there's things we want to accomplish. And working memory is the place where we pull together all sorts of information. in order to solve any novel problems we have. Any current situations that we have. and ultimately, it guides our behavior. Alright? So the singular thing should be becoming obvious to you now. Memory is not singular. We have episodic and semantic memory for information. We have procedural memory for skills. We have working memory. Maybe the most important one of them all. That we use to kind of bring everything together and to solve problems. And we also have a couple of other memory systems I haven't even talked about, by the way, sensory memory systems and other things. These are the big players, and these are the ones that we will talk about and bring in as we continue the lectures this week on memory. So here's just some more things. as, as a follow-up, here's a video. Again sometimes I like these little studio student projects, rather. This is one of them. It's a project on a guy named Endel Tulving a great psychologist from the University of Toronto, one of our pride and joys. he's the one that first talked about this distinction between episodic and semantic memory, so you'll hear a lot about Tulving and about that distinction. This is a general documentary on memory, so it will hit a lot of these systems we talked about. And this is a video by or, or yeah, by interviewing Alan Baddeley. Alan Baddeley is the guy who really is behind the working memory concept. And he's talking about the possibility of a procedural working memory, too. That you can imagine yourself doing procedures. So, I threw that in to show you that, you know, even when I talk about these clean divisions of memory, it's not always that clean either. So, I thought that was a good video for highlighting that, a couple of readings. This is just from Scholarpedia. just another description of all these multiple memory systems to give you a, you know, a sense of that. And a website that's more focused on working memory per se. all right, so check those out. That will, then you'll have a good sense that, hey, there isn't a single thing called memory. There's a bunch of things called memory. Next lecture, I'm going to tell you that it's not even really good to think of them as things. They're much more active, they're much more like processes. That will be the story that awaits you next lecture. Until then, have a great day. [BLANK_AUDIO]
