The paradox of remembering by forgetting

In some ways, this research restates the 'naive' discoveries most of us make about revision and retelling of stories of things that happen to us. However, it does take us further forward in thinking about mechanisms and so the possibility of helping ourselves to remember more effectively. I see shade of some of the techniques used by NLP in this, too.

The act of remembering is a complex cognitive activity because memory is associative, Wagner said, meaning that when someone, for example, thinks about what they ate for lunch the day before, it's likely to tap into memories of other lunches. "In order to remember, we need a set of mechanisms that allows us to select and target the memories we want, and allow them to win out over competing but irrelevant memories," he said. "So, initially, any act of retrieval is very resource intensive and places heavy demands on attention mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex." But when the competing but unimportant memories are successfully suppressed, fewer demands are placed on the frontal lobes to remember the relevant memories.

Now we just need to work on weakening those memories we don't want like the menu when we were revising 'that' topic over lunch ...
ScienceDaily: Forgetting Helps You Remember The Important Stuff, Researchers Say

Technorati Tags: memory, learning, research

Memory: recall, fantasy and religious claims.

This would seem to be quite an important piece of research, particularly as it has implications for so-called evidence for reincarnation, alien abduction etc.

people who commonly make source-monitoring errors respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.
"It might be harder to discriminate between a vivid image that you'd generated yourself and the memory of a perception of something you actually saw," he said in a telephone interview. Peters also found in his study, detailed in the March issue of Consciousness and Cognition, that people with implausible memories are also more likely to be depressed and to experience sleep problems, and this could also make them more prone to memory mistakes. And once people make this kind of mistake, they might be inclined to stick to their guns for spiritual reasons, McNally said. "It may be a variant expression of certain religious impulses," he said. "We suspect that this might be kind of a psychological buffering mechanism against the fear of death."

Of course, we are also going to have to work out how it affects the apologetics relating to the resurrection. I suspect not a huge amount because of the way that in principle it adds nothing new to the panoply of objections and the kind of 'forensic' workover that the likes of Josh McDowell, Nicky Gumbal and Frank Morrison have given it. But I may be wrong.
FOXNews.com - Study: People Who Recall Past Lives, Alien Abduction Prone to Memory Errors - Science News | Current Articles

Technorati Tags: resurrection, evidence, memory, false_memory, psychology