YOUR CHALLENGE: Design a warm up or pre reading activity to preface these reading tasks. As they stand they would be very dry. The level of difficulty for the reading tasks and the challenge is:**
MEMORY ONE
WHAT ARE MEMORIES MADE OF?
By: Hogo Spiers; Published: Saturday 14 January, 2012, The Guardian
QUESTIONS
1. Two key findings concerning memory are stated in the text. What are they?
2. What kind of memories are the following: what you had for dinner; how to read.
3. What does “its” refer to in the phrase “from its resemblance to a sea horse”?
4. How is it that patients who have sustained damage to their hippocampus show good short term memory?
5. In paragraph four, what does “which” refer to in the phrase “which results in the uncanny situation”?
6. How is it that some patients have poor short term memory but can recall the distant past?
7. According to paragraph5, the hippocampus ceases to be a key player in terms of supporting recall of all past experience and knowledge with one exception. This is: ..................................
8. What, according to paragraph six, are memories?
9. Pattern completion is a process during which..............................................................................
10. Read paragraph 8 carefully and state clearly what modern day device this ability of the brain reminds you of?
11. What conclusion can we draw from the example of the London taxi drivres?
KEY TO QUESTIONS
1. There appears to be no single memory store.../Memories are not static entities; over time they shift and migrate between different territories of the brain.
2. Declarative; non declarative
3. The hippocampus
4. Because this ability relies on the neocortex
5. The further back in time the memory was created, the more likely it is to survive.
6. Because the brain restructures memories.
7. Vividly picturing a scene in your mind.
8. Patterns inscribed in the connections between millions of neurons in your brain.
9. The initial activity of the cells is incoherent but via repeated reactivation,....
10. GPS
11. The physical structure of your brain is maleable depending on what you learn.
MEMORY TWO
MEMORY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
By: Alice Bell; Published: Saturday 14 January, 2012, The Guardian
QUESTIONS
1. What two conclusions can be drawn concerning memory from the writer’s story?
2. What does “it” refer to in the phrase “do we want to experience it collectively?”
3. Read the text to the end. Is the claim that google is making you stupid supported by the text? Why?
4. Is the claim that facebook has made everybody’s private life public tenable according to the text? Why?
5. What is the important current advantage of collective memories?
6. What is the potential advantage of collective memories?
KEY TO QUESTIONS
1. More and more ephemera seems to be kept online/ memories are becoming increasingly public social even.
2. Remembering
3. No, memories have long been stored outside our own individual bodies
4. No; leaking of personal pasts didn’t start with facebook.
5. It connects and reconnects us to things we need or want and would otherwise be without.
6. We’llbecome a little more open and honest about our own complex and sometimes embarassing personal histories.
MEMORY THREE
THE SCIENCE BEHIND MEMORY GLITCHES
By: Christian Jarett; Published: Saturday, 14 January, 2012; The Guardian.
QUESTIONS
1. Deja vu experiences are due to............................................................................
2. Flashbulb memories are similar to ordinary memories in terms of................................... but different in terms of .........................................
3. Read “the tip of the tongue phenomenon”. Why do we fail to remember something when it is on the tip of our tongue and we keep trying?
4. What conclusion can we draw concerning a word we can’t remember from the research cited?
5. Current research supports/ doesn’t support Freud’s views on repression because............... State two reasons.
6. For what three reasons did Wildschut reach the conclusion that “ nostalgia is emerging as a fundemental human strength”?
7. Why is it that we walk into a room and can’t remember what we went there for?
8. What conclusion can we draw from the stories of false memories recounted in the text?
KEY TO QUESTIONS
1. The memory process of familiarity
2. Forgetting or accuracy; vividness and the amount of detail
3. Because we look in the wrong part of our memory banks
4. We should deal with elusive words by looking them up immediately if we can or asking someone.
5. Traumatic memories are particularly vivid; emotionally charged words such as incest seem to be immune to the process
6. Nostalgia leaves people feeling more loved and in a better mood, it protects us from existential angst; it leads to people categorizing positive traits as relevant to themselves more quickly.
7. The act of passing through a doorway creates a new chapter in our unfolding memories.
8. The mind doesn’t maintain immutable archives
MEMORY FOUR
THE IMPORTANCE OF OBSERVATION
By: Ed Cooke; Published: Saturday, 15 January 2012; The Guardian
QUESTIONS
1. What does “this” refer to in the phrase “To understand how to do this”?
2. What is the key to achieving the above?
3. Read the questions that are listed at the top of the second page. What is the point of them?
4. Proust appears to have been less interested in....................... and more interested in..................
5. What are the problems when trying to remember names?
6. State clearly why the pieces of advice listed at the bottom of page two help one remember names?
7. What are the twin human failings that prevent us from focusing?
8. What is the immediate purpose of the technique suggested in this section? What is the ultimate purpose?
9. What point is the writer trying to make with the example of the obscure word and the tropical fish?
KEY
1. Experience the world as vividly, clearly and meaningfully as possible.
2. To treat perception as an active process of recognizing, probing,questioning, comparing, opening, feeling.
3. Digging deep into the unique details of the face, discovering its distinctive and memorable character
4. Pretty women; women with depth of character.
5. They give us much less to work with
6. Behaving as if you are really interested in a person’s face has the useful side effect of actually making it more interesting.
7. We’re typically so busy bouncing around our own minds that we devote...; Or, we hardly notice when our minds are running all over the place.
8. To learn to notice the difference between good and poor attention; to calm the mind and bring it under better control.
9. We actively discover meaning on the basis of prior knowledge. We only really perceive what we know how to perceive.
MEMORY FIVE
CAN MEMORY IMPROVE WITH AGE?
Published: Saturday, 14 January 2012; The Guardian
Level of difficulty:****
Level of difficulty:****
QUESTIONS
1. Why is it “important to challenge the stereotype of inexorable age related cognitive decline”?
2. What fact could make it possible for adults” to make the most of their memories” ?
3. Neural degeneration of frontal lobes may not, in fact, be as serious a problem as was once thought because....................................................................................................................
4. What change could improve recall in older adults?
5. Read the section titled “Attentional Lapses”. Attentional lapses become a problem during the following two processes: .......................................................................... The former can be adressed by ............................................................. while the latter can be adressed by ..................................................................................................................................................
6. In view of the above, what would you suggest the following people do to deal with their problems: person A can never find his car keys and person B is always forgetting appointments.
7. Read the section titled “Source Memory”. From this section we understand that older adults remember ................... better and may confuse ....................................and ....................................
8. The above problem can be dealt with by ...............................................................................
9. Read the section titled “Ignore the Hype”. All the advice given in this section can best be summarized by the following phrase in the second half of the section: ...............................................................
KEY
Students may need clues to be able to answer questions 5, 7 and 9. For question 5, they need to locate the bridge paragraphb which is the third paragraph in this section. This where the answer to the first blank is stated. They then need to pinpoint the solutions. While doing so they need to go for the all encompassing generalization rather than the explanations. For question 9, they need to make a mental list of all the advice, see what they have in common and then check the text.
KEY
Students may need clues to be able to answer questions 5, 7 and 9. For question 5, they need to locate the bridge paragraphb which is the third paragraph in this section. This where the answer to the first blank is stated. They then need to pinpoint the solutions. While doing so they need to go for the all encompassing generalization rather than the explanations. For question 9, they need to make a mental list of all the advice, see what they have in common and then check the text.
1. Because the stereotype of the forgetful older person may become a self fulfilling prophecy.
2. Various aspects of memory can remain relatively well preserved.
3. Decrease in frontal lobe activity may be accompanied by increased activation in other cortical regions.
4. Using strategies that promote the formation of rich, elaborate memory traces.Or: thinking deeply and elaborately about the meaning of information they are learning.
5. Encoding information, prospective memory / developing a fixed method for performing such tasks, by carrying out an action when a specific external event occurs.
6. Put it in the same place; put up a postit for example.
7. The statements themselves. Something they imagined and something that actually occured
8. Ascribing values to the information and the person conveying it
9. Enhancement of lifestyle factors
WRITING TASK
You work for a large daily. Your editor has asked you to write a summary of the five texts you have just read to post on the back page. Space is limited but you need to cover all the essential facts. What would you write? This is a five star activity by the way. Have fun
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