Lec 1

Textbook: Memory. 3rd Edition. by Alan Baddeley, Michael W. Eysenck, Michael C. Anderson.

Memory in the real world (newspapers, books, art)

Newspaper clippings
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: one hundred years of solitude
in the courtroom
in the movies
- Momento; 50 first dates;
Alzheimer disease

Introduction to methods in memory

Focus of the textbook
Experimental approach
- cognitive
- clinical
- neuroscience

Feats of memory. Our memory is amazing. For example, arrange to meet at a restaurant. It involves a lot of different things which cannot be handled by robot/computer right now.

Biological adaptations. Evolution of memory system. For example, foraging animal. They remember how to access the food, location of hidden food, recognition of danger, escape route. Another example is the hippocampal size in birds, birds do migrate and birds do not migrate, size is different. Another example is hippocampal size in taxi drivers who have great spatial layouts in their memory, and they had enhanced hippocampus in their memory.

Failures in memory. Leave it to the next lecture.