Summary
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the function and significance of memory. The great writer of remembrance, Marcel Proust, declared “We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand, sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison”. The memory is vital to life and without it we could not be the people we are, but can it really contain the sum of all our experience? Is it a repository constantly mounting events waiting to be plucked to consciousness, or if not, then under what criteria are memories turfed out?With Martin Conway, Professor of Psychology at Durham University; Mike Kopelman, Professor of Neuropsychiatry at King's College London and St Thomas’ Hospital; Kim Graham, Senior Scientist at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.
Transcript
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| 0:35.4 | Sounds. |
| 0:36.4 | Hello, the greatest writer of memory in my opinion, Marcel Proust said, quote, we are able to find everything in our memory which is like a |
| 0:44.4 | dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a |
| 0:49.4 | soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison. Can memory really contain the sum of all |
| 0:55.6 | our experience? Is it a repository of constantly mounting events waiting to be |
| 0:59.2 | plucked to consciousness? Or if not, then under what criteria are memories erased. |
| 1:04.2 | With me to discuss the science of memory, I'm Martin Conway, Professor of Psychology at Durham University, |
| 1:09.8 | Kim Graham, Senior Scientist at the Medical Research Council's |
| 1:12.5 | Condition and Brain Sciences Unit, and Mark Copleman, Professor of Neuropsychiatry |
| 1:17.1 | at King's College London and St Thomas's Hospital. |
| 1:20.4 | Martin Conway, when we perceive or experience something which is going to become a memory |
| 1:25.3 | what are we doing what's the initial process? |
| 1:28.0 | I think if I could answer that completely would have solved most of the problems of the human mind but we do have some |
| 1:35.0 | evidence and there are some things that can be said. |
| 1:38.4 | First of all, we don't really have any conscious control over what we encode. We can try to remember things but by and large |
| 1:44.8 | it's out of our conscious, attentional control. So there are a set of unconscious |
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