Evan Perry Bipolar Disorder

Bipolarity is something that will affects a person's life and the society surrounding this person by creating inmense mood swings that the time when these mood swings occur or the actions that will be done by them cant be controlled by the person. Bipolarity is often diagnosed between the ages of twnty and twenty five. Evan Perry was diagnosed at a very young age. He always stressed abotu having thigs in order, and he always had thougts about death to escape his problems. at a very young age he tried to commit suicide by jumping off his school's roof. after this his psychiatrist began to madicate him with lithium, and went into a rehab center that helped him go back to a stable mood. After a while Evan argued being able to manage his mood swings with out the lithium.

Evan commited suicide at the age of 15, jumping out of his apartment window, he was still under a low dosage of lithium. Bipolarity must be very difficult to handle do to the hard situations we encounter with life, and this disorder does not help us go through them but instead it only worsen them.

Articles on Memory

The Language of Emotions
This study was conducted by profesors Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stjin van Osselaer. It talks about how messages attarct more the attention of people if they are written in their native languages. This emotional trigger that is pulled with messages in their native language is due to their personal memories, or the language contaext in which this memories are related to the message. The message may have a word in it that incounsciously triggers a memories in which the word(s) had a significant meaning for them. People ususally have more memories related to their native languages then their foreign languages, and this is why a message in their own laguage will have a stronger effect. In terms of marketing it is advised that the messages sent through advertisement are in the peoples native languages. Companies who need to sell may use this study to get advice about their publicity.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215111433.htm

Some Short-Term Memories Die Suddenly
This study was conducted by Weiwei Zhang and Steve Luck. It basically proves that short-term memories dont fade away gradually, but the instantly disapear over a certain short period of time, usually seconds. these profesors gave out two test to twelve participants, one test was with squares, and different color fills, the person had to remember the colors of the square after some time. The second test was similar but it used colors.  “The memories are not like flashlights that get progressively weaker as the battery runs low, They are more like a laptop computer that continues working at the same speed until it suddenly shuts down.” Steve Luck. It will be important in life to avoid confusion when trying to make decisions based on weak, inaccurate memories.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429091806.htm

The Memories You Want to Forget are The Hardest to Lose
The author of this study is called Keith Payne, a professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Science and Elizabeth Corrigan a student. This study proved that the graphical negative images we see, are more permanent than reading negative words. They asked 218 participants to react to photographs instead of text. With this study they found out that people can not forget emotional events as esasily as unsignificant events, and that pleasant and unpleasant memories are hard to intentionally forget. Payne said that if there is enough powerful motivation to forget this memory it can be done. this willl help in the real life, to erase those traumatic memories that shape our personality.

The Placebo Effect

A Placebo is a know as a pharmacological inert substnce that produces and effect similar to what is expected from a pharacological active substance. Also know as fake surgeries and therapies. H.K. Beecher, a psychologist who studied these placebos, and their effects, wrote even a book called " The Powerful Placebo". he identified that a big percentage of the patients who submitted to placebo surgeries or treatments were satisfactorily relieved from their pains or defects. Although Beechers experiments had many faults. First he did not report all his findings, he only reported the improvements on patients with placebo treatments, but did not report when the patiants deteriorated. He did not report that forty percent of the time that placebos were applied, the patient deteriorated. Later a research group discovered that the placebos used in various experiemtns was no effective at all. They compared two grouos, one that was given placebos, and other that was not given medicine at all, and found out that both groups had the exact same results. I think that placebos may be effective some times but not always, it can depend on the patient. If the patient truly believes he can be healed with this treatment, it may actually work. if a patient has a negative view of his treatment, and believes he has no cure, no placebo will work, and real treatments will still take time to cure them. 

Eye-Witness Reports

Loftus and Palmer (1974)

In this study Loftus and Palmer are attempting to demonstrate that memory is not a factual recording of an event and that memories can become distorted by other information which occurs after the event.
Many of the early studies of memory demonstrated how memories are not accurate records of our experiences. It seems that we try to fit past events into our existing representations of the world, making the memory more coherent or make more sense for us.
Much research has documented how difficult it is for people to estimate numerical details such as time, speed and distance. Judgement of speed is especially difficult, with witnesses of traffic accidents varying in their estimations as to how fast a vehicle was actually travelling.
Elizabeth Loftus is a leading figure in the field of eyewitness testimony research. She has demonstrated through the use of leading questions how it is possible to distort a person’s memory of an event.
The study actually consists of two laboratory experiments. The independent variable in both of the experiments is the verb used. The dependent variable in the first experiment is the participant’s speed estimate and the dependent variable in the second experiment is whether the participant believed they saw glass.

Difference in Memories

The difference in memory, referring to gender does exist.  It has been proven that women have a better episodic memory than men. Although men have a better memory when it comes to thing for its own survival, like exiting the woods, men have a better memory. Women’s memory gets better when it comes to using verbal abilities, but decrease when they have to use their visuospatial abilities. This means that women have a much better hearing memory, than a visual memory. There are also environmental factors that can affect the results, like education. If a person is educated he or she may have a better short or long term memory, and have studied techniques to remember a new event. Do to the results of this experiment it is proven that females have a superior episodic memory than males.

There are differences in memory regarding cultures. It has been proved through studies; Caucasians tend to have better memory than Americans because of what their cultures focus on, and last the Asians. The memory of each culture also depends on their mother. On different cultures mothers interact more with their children. If a mother continuously asks the child about his memories, the child will eventually get a better memory.

Alzeihmer's Disease

 I learned that Alzeihmer is an unstopable, and uncurable disease, that gradually eats up your brain, till it kills you. i feel very sorry for the people you have this, and do not wish for me or any of my family members to get it because I now understand that it is really hard to live with this disease, and to see a relative live with it. This disease is more common on elderly people, and as the people get older we see the Alzeimer get more intense. Currentl there is no cure for this disease, and the number of people affected is big and will continue growing. Currently 5 million Americans suffer from Alzeihmer, and it is estimated if a cure is not found, that by 2050 the number will increase to 13.4 million Americans. There are some activities that you can perform in order to delay the disease or tu reduce the intensity of it, but it will not stop it. Such activities include games, and social interaction. Maintaining a healthy diet and doing regular exercise mught also lower the risk of getting Alzeihmers. I would really like for a cure to be invented becuase I think that elderly people deserve to enjoy their last years on Earth, and not live in a institution, were they are taken away their freedom, and many priviledges that life offers them. I think that doctors should be more concerned about this disease, because a large number of people already have it, and if they dont begin to pay attention to it the poeple affected will be more and more each day.

How does Memory Work

1. Explain the concept of sensory memory.
Sensory Memory is the ability to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased. there are two types : Ionic and Echoic memory.

2. Give an example of sensory memory.
Echoic Memory: sensory memory related to hearing, it last less than four seconds.

3. What is the capacity of our sensory memory?
The capacity of sensory memory is very short it last about four seconds.

4. Describe the concept of short-term memory.
The capacity of holding a small amount of information in mind in an active readily available state, for a short period of time.

5. What is the "magic number" as it relates to short-term memory and who conducted the experiment which established this measurement
The capacity of the sensory or short term memory is measured in seconds, the is an estimate that this capacity is seven, plus or minus two units. This is known as the Miller Law.

6. What is chunking?
Chunking is a strategy for making more efficient use of short-term memory by recoding information or organizing items into familiar manageable units.

7. What has been determined to be the ideal size of "chunks" for both letters and numbers?
the ideal size has been referred as two, three, and six as the ideal size of "chunks" for both letters and numbers.

8. Which mode of encoding does short-term memory mostly rely on, acoustic or visual?
Short-term memory is believed to rely more on acoustic coding than visual coding.

9. Explain the duration and capacity of long-term memory.
Long-term memoey can las as little as day or as long as decades. The capacity of the long term memory acn be decades and then begin to fade over time. it can store lts of information for lots of time.

10. Explain in detail the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory.
This model is a proposal of the memory structure, it proposes that human memory iinvolves a sequence of three stages, Sensory Memory: retain information in a sort of unprocessed way trough a stimulus for less than a second, Short-Term Memory: allows us to remember information long enough to use it, Long-term memory: provides the lasting retention of information.
11. Identify three criticisms or limitations of the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory.
Something that is criticized of this model is the it does not include any subdivision in the stages of memory, because it has a linear structure. The model does not acknowledge the asynchronous of the neural activity.
This model deals with the forms of memory, but it does not take into account which information is presented can then be seen as a form of a power check that could not be disrupted.
12.Explain the Levels of Processing Model of memory.

13. What is maintenance rehearsal - give an example.
Maintenance rehearsal is a type of rehearsal proposed by Craik and Lockhart  in their Levels of Processing Model of memory. Maintenance rehearsal involves rote repetition of an item's auditory representation. Different to elaborative rehearsal, this type of rehearsal does not lead to stronger or more durable memories.


14. What is elaborative rehearsal - give an example.
Elaborative rehearsal is a type of rehearsal proposed by Craik and Lockhart  in their Levels of Processing model of memory. Elaborative rehearsal involves deep sematic processing of a to-be-remembered item resulting in the production of durable memories.
For example, if you were presented with a list of digits for later recall (4968214), grouping the digits together to form a phone number transforms the stimuli from a meaningless string of digits to something that has meaning.


15. Who developed the Levels of Processing Model and the concepts of maintenance and elaborative rehearsal?
Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart