Educating while entertaining a packed Love Auditorium Thursday afternoon, Daniel Schacter, a world-renowned expert on human memory lectured on "The Fragile Power of Human Memory."
His lecture focused on three aspects of memory: How it retains information through encoding, its susceptibility to distortions and its multiple forms. He gave an overview of existing research and previous findings in the field while demonstrating his research on how brain activity in memory creation changes based upon the way information is encoded.
Schacter is chair of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and received the William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association for his book, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past.
Thursday, Schacter used examples to give the audience a sense of memory's power as well as its fragility.
He told the story of Franco Mañanni, an Italian immigrant who lived in San Francisco in 1950s and '60s. Mañanni had an illness he recovered from, but he started experiencing vivid images of his childhood village. He found the images so powerful that he began to paint them. This attracted the attention of researchers, who sent a photographer to Mañanni's home village.
Schacter put the photographs of the Italian village and Mañanni's paintings side-by-side, showing their incredible similarity but also noting subtle differences, such as a non-existent window or a misplaced wall.
Schacter illustrated one of memory's pitfalls, citing a study he conducted on defendants whose innocence was proven with DNA testing. "Out of the 40 persons considered, 36 were initially misidentified," he said, showing the powerful effects memory has in the world.
Schacter's lecture was well-suited for the diverse audience in attendance, as he was able to captivate and involve psychology professors, medical students, post-doctoral fellows and undergraduates alike.
Schacter's most impressive show of memory's fragility came when he conducted a simple test with those attending his lecture.
He read off a list of 12 words, including "candy," "soda" and "sour," and asked the audience to remember as many of them as they could.
He then read a different list with three words, asking the audience to raise their hands if each of the three were also on the original list of 12. When he came to the word "sweet," almost 80 percent of the audience thought that the word was included on the original list, when only several synonyms for it were actually there. Schacter used this stunning example to showcase just how easy it is for the human mind to create false memories.
Schacter became interested in memory research while working as a research assistant at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Durham, where he observed patients unable to recall conversations from minutes ago due to brain damage. "I became impressed with memory," he said, adding that he also realized that "memory is often taken for granted; it can disappear quite easily."
Schacter's lecture was the first in a series launched by Duke's new Center for Cognitive Neurosciences.
George Mangun, director of the Center for Cognitive Neurosciences, was pleased with Schacter's lecture. "It was a smashing success and a good way to begin the center's interdisciplinary role," he said. "There were people here from the medical school, University of [North Carolina at] Chapel Hill, as well as the local community."
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