clair073

I just attended a “memory schema” symposium at the annual meeting of the Society of Neuroscience. The “schema” idea is that memory of prior learning provides a framework or context for new learning. That is, new information is evaluated for relevance to preexisting schema, which may influence how readily new information transfers into memory. The notion of schema stems originally from Harry Harlow’s ideas back in the 1940s. Harlow showed that when a monkey learns a new kind of problem, he solves it by slow plodding trial and error. However, if he has experience with a large number of problems of a similar type or class, the trial and error is replaced by a process in which the individual problems are eventually solved insightfully. For example, if you learn how to do task A, B, and C, when presented with a new task D, you might say to yourself, “I don’t know how to do this task D, but it is like task B, and I do know how to do that!” Thus, you have a leg up on learning how to do task D...

It has taken 50 years, but memory research has finally put it all together to provide practical guidance to reduce forgetting of what we need to remember and promote forgetting of useless or disturbing memories. I have blogged before about animal studies showing that bad memories can be erased. Bad memories are often created like conditioned reflexes in Pavlov’s dogs. That is, the situational context in which bad things occur act as associational cues that help cement the memory. If the cues are repeatedly present but the bad event is not, the learned associated tends to go away. But in both animals and humans, this “extinction” as it is called is not really permanent and the bad memories can recur.   Memory researchers have recently discovered that when a memory is recalled, whether good or bad, there is a short time where it can be modified by new thought or experience, and then it is put back in storage (called “reconsolidation”). When this phenomenon was discovered, it raised t...