Out of body memories

A recent study from two Swedish universities appear to be showing that how well our memories work depend on where our ”self” is located. Unfortunately according to the Swedish news agancy Tidningarnas telegrambyrå (TT) the study isn't published yet so this comment is only based on what is reported in the ordinary press, and we all know how warped science reporting can be. The findings will be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) next week according to TT.

What they appear to have done is to show some events to people divided into two groups, one group present in ”themselves” and one group present outside of ”themselves”. The out of body experience was created using VR-goggles, an interesting and well tested technique to achieve this effect. They later tested the participants memories of the events and found that the people who were present in “themselves” remembered the events much better than the ones using the VR-goggles.

This reminded me about a similar study made concerning the effect of the environment on memory. The experiment was conducted as following. Half of the participants learned some information on land beside a pool and the second half learned the same information under water in the pool. For the memory test phase half of the people in the pool did it on land, and half of the people on land did the memory task under water. It was found the what was important for a good recall of the information was that the retrieval of the memory was in the same environment as the one you learned the information.

I haven't read the study so I don't know if they in some way took this into account but the study would be flawed if the memory test was not made using the same division of the subjects in the learning phase and the test phase as described above. If the memory test was made without the VR-goggles for all the participants it is not a surprise that the people who learned the information without the VR-goggles had the best result.

We are memories

I just yesterday bought and read ”Moonwalking with Einstein – the art and science of remembering everything” by Joshua Foer, or to be honest it took me until 3 am. today to finish reading it.

The book takes a look at the subculture of people competing in memory in the US and worldwide. It is not a detailed book about how memory systems work or about what happens in the brain. It is in some ways a typical road-trip story where the author goes on an adventure. In this case he manages to win the US championships after practising for a year.

I liked the book but I also have many friends interested in memory work and can have a use of it myself sometimes. Only a week a go I met Mattias Ribbing who is out with a new book about memory systems where he (according to himself) tries to make them practical and not focused on competition.

The book talks about the science behind memory and also the history and how remembering texts changed from Homer's works that was retold in an oral tradition before they were written down, to today when some believe that wikiepedia makes it unnecessary to remember anything. It is an easy and in my opinion well written book that introduces the reader not only to the memory athletes subculture and to a part of mentalism (memory work) but also to the idea of how important memory was and still is. Because who would we be without our memories?

I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in philosophy of mind, psychology, rhetoric and mentalism, beside of course people that just want to know more about our memory and what it can be trained to do. The reason that it is interesting from a rhetorical point of view is that many of these memory systems were used by the ancients and described by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus and Marcus Tullius Cicero as tools for the orator.

Though not everyone agrees that it is a good book as this review from the Guardian shows, although I think it is somewhat telling that all the comments on the page defend the book.

A short update before the storm

Here in Sweden Midsummer is an important holiday and I spent it in Dalarna, the region of Sweden that I am from and also a region famous for its Midsummer celebrations that are very much according to all traditions. (I am not going to go into details about all the different types of celebrations but let us say that some of them involve large amounts of alcohol.)
What I enjoy with Midsummer is the sense of coming home, seeing people that you haven't seen in a very long time. And although I worked two of the days that I spent in Dalarna it felt very much as a holiday.
I even had plenty of time to reminiscence about when I lived in Dalarna. I found one train of thought particular interesting. I was walking by “Dalarnas regemente” that is the old army barracks in Falun. When I was living in the city we still had general conscription in Swede and the area was maybe not heavily guarded, but had barbed wire surrounding it and armed military guards at the entrances.
The thing is that I was heading for a place on the other side of the barracks and started to walk around it. But the entire barrack area have changed since Sweden changed to a having a professional army. It is now a business park with a lot of different companies. There are no armed guards, no barbed wire, not even a fence. Still I had begun to walk around the area.
I stopped and turned around, I had no reason to take the long way around, it was just out of habit that I started out on the usual way. But I actually had to stop and think about if I wanted to walk through the barracks area, it didn't feel right.
It is not that I had not been inside before. During my High School days I actually got inside once a week. My name was written down in a folder at the guard station among other people that practised fencing at the old gymnasium. Once I started my military service we were told that you could not get time of for participating in athletic events like football matches or things like that, but there were of course exceptions for certain sports with a more military flavour. So being a fencer had its privileges.
Maybe it was my experience of the area as an off limit and secure area that made it somewhat difficult to imagine that it could be possible to http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifjust cross it to get to the other side. In this case my reasoning faculties won fairly easily over my emotional response and I crossed the old barracks-yard, walked passed the old gymnasium where we practised fencing so many years ago. It was a long time ago I was there the last time, it is perhaps our memories of times gone by that makes us feel old, but I found no discomfort in remembering. I just found my reaction to the change of reality compared to my memories very revealing.

But what about the storm? Later today (after I have slept a bit) I will be performing for the conference “Strings 2011” at Uppsala castle, and the next month is extremely busy with a lot of things to do, in fact there are only three days I don't have plans for up to and including the first week of August. If I find the time that might imply some interesting posts on this blog.