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Does Photographic memory exist? Pt. 1

18 November 2011 /

Photographic memory is one of those concepts that is understood and shown by pop-psychology and the media a lot more than it is shown by academic psychology. Just think of how many films, books and TV shows you’ve seen featuring a character with perfect factual recall or full memory of almost every experience they’ve had.

But in real life, photographic memory cannot be easily found – scientists and researchers are still debating whether it actually exists. While people have often come forward saying they have an exceptional or photographic memory, they are found to be mistaken, and there are only a few cases where a person could genuinely have a photographic memory.

From my existing psychology education, I know of three reasons why someone can have a much better memory than average. For each of these, I have mini-theories of whether these could turn into photographic memory if it exists, and how they might work. The first condition, Hyperthymesia, is below the cut.

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Where have all the genii gone?

31 October 2011 /

The title of this might sound a little unexpected, but to clarify,when I say genii, I’m not talking about very smart people. Rather, I’m on about polymaths – people who are experts, and even innovators, in many different areas. The obvious example for most people is Da Vinci, and it’s very difficult to name anyone recent who is like this- my question is, why is that?

Using my random theory from a few weeks ago, one idea for why less people are innovators and polymaths today is that we are forced by our culture and education to specialise what we want to do way too early in life. The idea of the connections is that as soon as we start narrowing down what areas we focus on, we increase the strength and regularity of the connections dealing with it, which makes connections for other areas weaker as they are used less. The fact they are weaker then means it is more difficult to use them, so they are used even less.

In England we have to start specialising from the age of 14, when we choose our GCSE options. Then, we pick A-Levels, which narrows us down again because the university admission system and syllabus criteria mean that when we pick one subject, we often have to pick others that are related- for example, people studying Chemistry will almost always want to, or be forced to, study Maths, Physics and/or Biology as well. Then there is university, where we have to choose just one subject to gain our knowledge and expand our thinking in.

Applying the theory to our education system means that from early adolescence teens are already made to focus down on a few areas, creating generations who excel at one subject, but cannot diversify or innovate as they cannot connect their subject to the majority of the other potential knowledge that is around them.

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It’s blog-voting time again :)

4 October 2011 /

I’ve now finished the series of histories on some of the most famous psychologists, although it only scratched the surface of just how many influential psychologists there have been over the years. The only problem now is, I don’t know what to write about next. So, it’s over to you guys- what would you like to see next? 
Option A- could be that you ask (either by comments, formspring, email etc) questions about psychology in general or specific parts, and I attempt to answer them?
Option B- I could write about some of the “unsung heroes” of psychology, the people that have done loads of studies and found interesting things about people, but for some reason have never been that well known.
Option C- something else entirely, so if you have any ideas, feel free to tell me them! =)

History of Psychology – Now for my favourite psychologist…

28 September 2011 /

I’ve been looking forward to writing this blog for ages, as it’s on one of my favourite psychologists; the humanist Abraham Maslow. The reason I like Maslow so much is that he was different from the psychologists before him:  he did not use psychology for looking at people’s symptoms, but instead for looking at the healthiest and most whole people- for example, he studied only the healthiest 1% of college students in most of his experiments.

Maslow continued Rogers’ optimistic approach to psychology, seeking to understand what drove the most successful and productive people. His theory was that people were driven by needs at 4 different levels, which correspond with the 4 ways of seeing the world that Existential Psychology talked about. Unfortunately,  I have no idea if this was coincidental or not. These levels formed his moderately famous Hierarchy of Needs, where the lower needs have to be met to enable later needs to develop and be met. However, there are flaws with this theory, such as why people who temporarily reach self-actualisation are able to ignore their other needs…a good example of this is the stereotype of the “starving artist”.

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History of Psychology -Carl Rogers

20 September 2011 /

As I mentioned last week, Humanistic Psychology is based on aspects of life specific to humans, which borrows from Christian thoughts about the uniqueness of humans. The main areas of study include personal responsibility, values, and freedom, and it also studies the process of conscious experience (known as phenomenology, which is a very fun word to pronounce).

The Humanist psychologists believed that people were basically good, and everybody naturally wanted to be the best person they could. Rogers named this best version the “real self”, but later Humanists had different terms for it. For Rogers, people already have the ability to grow and solve their problems, they just need to be made aware of that. Related to that, he believed psychological problems weren’t inbuilt in a person but were caused by incongruence– the gap between their real self’s “I am…” and their learned views of “I should be…”.

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What happens when Philosophy invades Psychology…

14 September 2011 /

In the last 200 years the dominant views in psychology have changed, and gradually became more complex and comprehensive. Despite this, many would argue that they are all flawed,  because they only use one thing to explain behaviour. E.g in behavioural psychology every behaviour is a learned association, in psychodynamic psychology almost every behaviour can be explained by unconscious conflicts.

In my opinion, reducing human behaviour down to one function means that a theory can never completely explain how we behave, as we are too complicated for that. Luckily, philosophy got to that conclusion years before I did.

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History of Psychology – Social Cognition:the psychological blender

7 September 2011 /

Social Cognition is the study of how people interpret and respond to social groups and situations, and it is a combination of social, cognitive, and developmental psychology blended together. It has been the dominant way of explaining social behaviour since the 1980’s, and is used today in even more scientific areas such as Cognitive Neuroscience.

Social Cognition is based on a cognitive theory called schema theory. A schema is our mental framework that represents an object; for example, our schema of a banana would be that it is a fruit, yellow, and curved. It would also contain the knowledge that a banana is edible, and the process of opening and eating it, once we have learnt that. We then have social schemata for social situations we find ourselves in, as well as schemata for different individuals and groups of people we interact with. The schemata we make affect our social decisions, such as how we decide who is at fault in an argument, whether someone’s behaviour is due to them or their situation, and even to whether someone appears mentally ill.

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History of Psychology – Opening the “Black Box”

6 September 2011 /

While Social Psychology grew during the 1950’s and 1960’s, a majority of psychologists were still behaviourists.But the limits of behaviourism and its “black box” separating stimuli and responses had become more obvious, so psychologists wanted new ways to understand how the mind connected S to R. Also in the 1960’s, technology had progressed far beyond what was possible in previous decades, especially in computing science; computers had become a more viable and popular (and almost affordable) way of processing information.


Maybe due to this combination, the new paradigm in psychology was Cognitive Psychology, which attempted to study people’s actual  mental processes, such as memory, attention, and perception- it did this by seeing minds as working in a similar way to a computer.  The first person to use a computer analogy was Broadbent, who believed the brain could be seen as the “hardware”, and processes such as attention as the “software”. His Information Processing Model has been the dominant idea in psychology from the 1960’s up until the present day, which is remarkable considering how many sub-fields and approaches to psychology there now are.

Cognitive Psychology is also another example of psychology being connected to a lot of other topics; its development was originally thanks to not only computing, but the work of  Chomsky , Descartes, and 18th century empirical philosophers as well. This still applies today, as Cognitivism can be combined with other areas of psychology to form new fields e.g. Cognitive + Biological psychology= Evolutionary psychology. Another important combination is Cognitive + Developmental Psychology, which led to new theories of how children’s minds develop and how they learn, overlapping with educational psychology.

An important experiment which helped found Cognitive Psychology is Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve- after testing himself remembering patterns of syllables, Ebbinghaus found that his recall dropped by half unless he revisited what he had learnt. In other words, he’s probably why people now know about revision, which is a pretty good reason for students to dislike this study.

Although many famous Cognitive Psychology experiments are about memory, it actually studies many more areas- from the scientific and experimental (such as visual perception and patterns) to the more abstract and philosophical (such as how we sense time passing, and how we develop language). This makes it one of the most useful psychological viewpoints, because it can be used in so many areas of psychology.

History of Psychology – Social Learning Theory

4 September 2011 /

Social psychology is in a way a psychology of compromise, as it strikes the middle ground between psychodynamic psychology (the “first force”) and behavioural psychology (the “second force”). This is strongly seen in its most well-known contribution, Social Learning Theory, as SLT is a balance between psychodynamic explanations of learning, which are seen as too deep, and behaviourist explanations, which are seen as too superficial.

The SLT was formed by Albert Bandura, who is often regarded as the most famous living psychologist. Bandura conducted the famous “Bobo Doll” studies, where 3-4 year olds watched an adult being neutral or aggressive to a bobo doll (an inflatable doll that bounces upright when pushed over), and then being either praised, punished, or receiving no reaction for being aggressive. The children were each let loose in a room filled with toys including a bobo doll. Bandura found that children who watched the adult being aggressive were more likely to also be aggressive towards the doll, especially if the adult was rewarded for their behaviour.

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History of Psychology – the Stanford Prison Experiment

23 August 2011 /

Another massively controversial psychological study is Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most criticised experiments in modern psychology.

In the experiment, university students were chosen to play the roles of prisoners or prison guards in a fake prison environment; the aim of the study was to test their theory that the often-violent behaviour of prison guards was due to their personality traits rather than their environment. Although this was a commendable aim, the problem with this study lay in its realism and design- the simulation was so effective that both the participants and the experimenters became too involved and could not see how unethical the situation had become.

While the study was supposed to last two weeks, it had to be stopped after just 6 days as the participants were playing their roles too well. Some of the prison guards had become violent, even showing sadistic tendencies and torturing prisoners, while the prisoners had become passive and accepting, forgetting the situation was not real and they did not deserve the treatment. One prisoner even had to be removed after suffering a nervous breakdown on day 3.

This may sound like the experiment was just conducted on violent or unstable people, but in fact the opposite is true; the participants were all middle-class university students, specifically selected because they had perfect psychological health. The results of the experiment were incredibly valuable despite its problems, because they showed that cruel behaviour was not simply caused by someone being a “bad” or violent person. Instead, people put into extreme situations responded in extreme ways, especially if there were contributing factors such as the processes of depersonalisation and deindividuation.

This study, along with Milgram’s  research, demonstrated how authority and social environment affected behaviour, a theme which has been present and debated in psychology ever since.