A dull overcast evening, which looked a lot colder from the inside than it was when I was actually outside. And I whiled away the wait on the platform at Epsom watching a pigeon strip the buds off the twig that it was sitting on, it striking me that a pigeon was quite a large bird and could get through a lot of buds if it had a taste for them. While associating back to childhood stone fruit trees, with much damage being done by various sorts of tits at this time of year, often resulting in lots of bare twigs, sporting just the odd terminal leaf which managed to regenerate after attack. Much unsuccessful pondering about how to ward off said attack, with the trees in question being rather too big and awkward to net.
Simons made use of a fine projector, able to project very sharp and very large images of objects placed on its table onto the screen behind him. A sort of higher grade version of the epidiascopes occasionally used in my day and which might now be called a document camera. Being a young person, he also worked mobile phones into the proceedings, with the idea being that we plugged our mobile phones into some special web site, he asked us various questions, we ticked various boxes on our phones and he got the scores back on his screen in real time - near three hundred of them.
The first test was his reading out a list of words, all related to windows in this case, and then testing us for the presence of particular words in the list just read out. All of us knew that the word 'banana' was missing, which indeed it was, while around half of us knew that the word 'window' was present, which it was not. Thus demonstrating that this sort of memory concentrates on the gist of things rather than the details. With all the words being window related, the brain assumed that window must have been one of them.
I think that the second test was another list, the details of which I forget, but it demonstrated that we were all much better at remembering things which involved us than things which were neutral. So we remembered denying that we were lazy while we forgot about the cheese.
A clever technique: the results of the polling a large number of people were decisive and it was hard deny the conclusion by means of some special pleading about one's special circumstances.
There was talk of memories being cued, with some people having favourite cues, perhaps smells or tastes. Various quotes from writers such as Proust. From where I associated to the work that Fernyhough has done on triggering memories with pictures, noticed at reference 2. While Simons thought that you say 'Fernyhoo' which was news to me and I would clearly have given myself away badly had I attempted to talk about him beforehand.
Then, in the context of testing people's memories, talk of both whether they remembered something or not and of the strength of that memory, with some memory defects being associated more with a lack of confidence in memories, rather than with those memories being wrong. Another angle was the quality of the memory, the amount of detail that was available. So you remembered that a bird flew into the church, but can you remember what sort of a bird it was or where it perched? Did you remember which way up the umbrella was?
Some people, for example those with what is now called PTSD, have a problem with memory inhibition, with blocking unpleasant memories. On which point a lady in the audience reminded us that most ladies were very good at blocking out the unpleasant parts of childbirth, good enough that they were not stopped from going around that bouy again.
While other people have a problem with sorting out fictional memories from real memories. Or a problem with reality testing. Which can sometimes lead to motor systems being put onto a state of alert, and sometimes to their being triggered, quite inappropriately. Something that schizophrenics know all about.
He closed with gyrus talk. First something called the angular gyrus, then something called the paracingulate gyrus. Not being completely sure about the last of these, I asked Bing, and he turned up the paper illustrated, a paper which was free unlike that noticed in the last post. Perhaps being older is what makes the difference. It confirmed that there was indeed something called the paracingulate gyrus, right in the middle of the brain and that it was mixed up with schizophrenia. While Simons was making the point that the length of this gyrus was correlated with both the propensity to hallucinate and with schizophrenia, an unusually simple linkage between undamaged brain anatomy and a problem. I worried about how you would measure the length of either a gyrus or a sulcus: absent, short, prominent fair enough ('... The paracingulate gyrus between the cingulate sulcus and any paracingulate sulcus was not included as part of the ACC [anterior cingulate gyrus]. However, variability in the presence of the paracingulate sulcus influences measures of ACC morphometry ... Therefore, the prominence of the paracingulate sulcus was coded using a 3 tiered rating system (0 for absent, 1 for present, 2 for prominent), according to the guidelines in ... and was used as a covariate in the analyses of the ACC measures ...'), but how do you convert a geographical feature of this sort into millimetres?
I also worried about the paper's conclusion: 'our findings suggest that decreases in the gray matter volume of the PCC occur in schizophrenia subjects and their siblings. The presence of such decreases in the non-psychotic siblings of schizophrenia subjects suggests that heritable factors may be involved in the development of cortical abnormalities in schizophrenia', eventually deciding that they were OK, with the proviso that the cortical abnormality was a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Out in time to catch a procession of fancy looking sports cars heading noisily down Piccadilly towards Hyde Park Corner. Perhaps they were going to have one of those rich kids' races around the M25.
Two ones at the aeroplane game at Earlsfield, with the two planes coming into their run down to Heathrow from vary different angles over east London.
Home to Epsom, to a taxi which stank of air freshener. A taxi borne disease which I associate with Swindon, where more or less all the taxis are infected. I never did get to find out why, despite spending quality time there.
PS: next to me I had a Spanish lady who had lived in London, presently Ealing, for most of her married life and her children had gone to university here. She was an expert on lectures and told me about the ones put on by Imperial College and about a website which listed all of them. A WEA version of the Bachtrack website (reference 5) which I already knew about. Unfortunately I did not make a note of its name at the time and have now forgotten it.
Reference 1: http://www.memlab.psychol.cam.ac.uk/.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/madeleine-moments.html.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/dental-affairs.html.
Reference 4: Cingulate gyrus neuroanatomy in schizophrenia subjects and their non-psychotic siblings - Daniel R. Calabrese, Lei Wang, Michael P. Harms, J. Tilak Ratnanather and others - 2008.
Reference 5: https://bachtrack.com/.
No comments:
Post a Comment