An old Jedi mind trick

A new bit of research news has brought up old mem­o­ries for me today. Researchers at the University of California have found that an area of the brain called the perirhi­nal cor­text may help with the for­ma­tion of asso­cia­tive memories.

(Photo: Victor Lavrentev)

Previously, sci­en­tists believed that when the brain assem­bled dif­fer­ent ele­ments of an expe­ri­ence into a com­plete mem­ory, the work all hap­pened in the hip­pocam­pus. That assump­tion no longer appears true.

The researchers stud­ied vol­un­teers’ brains with a func­tional MRI sys­tem to see what parts of the brain lit up when the vol­un­teers were asked to mem­o­rize word pairs, such as “motor/bear.” Volunteers were asked to either remem­ber the pair by fit­ting them into a sen­tence or, more asso­cia­tively, by learn­ing them as a new com­pound word, like “motorbear.”

When the vol­un­teers used that more asso­cia­tive approach, their perirhi­nal cor­tices lit up on the fMRI, sug­gest­ing that the cor­tex can form sim­ple associations.

The rea­son I men­tion this par­tic­u­lar study is because it reminds me of the oral tra­di­tions class I took in col­lege. Each mem­ber of the class was asked to use a mem­ory the­ater to per­form a great feat of mem­o­riza­tion. Some peo­ple mem­o­rized entire chap­ters from books. Others, like me, mem­o­rized long lists of items and could repeat them in any order start­ing from any point. (I mem­o­rized the entire Criterion Collection of DVDs).

Memory the­aters work by asso­ci­at­ing a mem­ory with an image and plac­ing that image in a pre­de­ter­mined spot in a place that you have inti­mate knowl­edge of. Sounds com­pli­cated, but it’s not. Say you are inti­mately famil­iar with the your child­hood bed­room or your kitchen. You can prob­a­bly remem­ber the shelves and spaces and places where every­thing could be stashed, right?

Well take one of those places and imag­ine it in detail. Start from the left side of the room and move to the right until you’ve made a com­plete cir­cle. Note as you go, in order, the cubby holes and hid­ing places and stor­age places you remem­ber. Do this until you have a good series of places sorted out in your head.

You’ve just built a mem­ory the­ater through asso­ci­a­tion. Now all you have to do is put mem­o­ries into that the­ater, and this is where the con­nec­tion with the study men­tioned above comes in.

What our pro­fes­sor told us — and I still believe it to this day — is that the human mind tends to remem­ber the grotesque or the unusual. That’s why so many of the oral sto­ries con­tained such extrav­a­gant and often gory detail; that sort of imagery sim­ply stuck in the minds of the ancient bards telling the tales.

So when he asked us to fill our mem­ory the­aters, we were sup­posed to come up with grotesque (often sex­ual or deviant) images of those mem­o­ries that would fill the spaces in our the­aters. The more hor­ri­fy­ing, the bet­ter for mem­ory — so if you were try­ing to remem­ber the name of the per­son who wrote Neuromancer you might envi­sion William the Conqueror step­ping onto the soil of England car­ry­ing his Gibson gui­tar (William Gibson, if you didn’t catch that).

Better yet — for your mem­ory, if not your ten­der sen­si­bil­i­ties — you would imag­ine William the Conqueror madly stab­bing him­self through the guts with the bro­ken shards of his Gibson gui­tar, pic­tur­ing in your mind how the blood spat­ters onto his “Hi, my name is William” nametag and onto the logo for the Gibson gui­tar. See, much more memorable.

I sup­pose the point of all this is just to say that vol­un­teer test sub­jects in California remem­ber­ing word pairs by cre­at­ing com­pound words out of them reminds me of William the Conqueror stab­bing him­self with a gui­tar — or some­thing like that. Talk about associations.

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