Book Reading #32 - Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 9: Memory Inc.

Reference:
Slater, Lauren. Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. W.W. Norton & Company: 2008.


Summary:
The chapter begins by Dr. Scoville examining his patient, Henry, in order to hopefully cure Henry's epilepsy. Dr. Scoville decides to remove Henry's hippocampus which actually removes most of Henry's memory to where he cannot learn new things.  This discovered that memory was (at least in part) flesh.

Brenda Milner decided to observe Henry in order to see just what memory he had and what he didn't have. She found that he still had all of his procedural, or unconscious memory.

Eric Kandel, dealing with sea slugs, found that stimulating these slugs caused reflex which could be modified by three forms of learning: habituation, sensitization, and classical conditioning.  He observed what happened to the slugs neurons as it learned.  He was a reductionist so looking simply at two neurons, he found that a sensory and motor neuron pass stronger impulses to each other as a behavior becomes engraved.  This shows that the more we do something the more it gets truly ingrained into our minds.  This went off on CREB which is the stuff the brain makes to increase these bonds, or increase our memory.  She finishes the chapter talking about Memory Pharmaceuticals which is developing a pill that increases memory.

Discussion:
This chapter was fairly interesting but got a little too technical for me.  It lost me when it got to all the jargon.  Nonetheless it was interesting seeing concrete evidence of our neurons working together to form a bond.  It was also interesting that given the facilities Henry could perform a task but didn't actually know that he was suppose to do that task; his higher learning was shot but his procedural memory was still there.