Shafyyah Shah
9 January 2015
Senior Thesis
Olfactory Memory
In our life memory are fundamentally important to our development. They form the basis
of our personality from attitude to expectations. Memory is used as an unconscious mindset
when we need them we can refer back to them as we live our lives. When an event occurs we can
fixate the situation. We check to see if it’s bad, good, or even unfamiliar. With this we decide to
react automatically, all in a split second. If we didn’t have memory we would forget the simplest
task or even face recognition. Countless reasons and endless possibility, if we didn’t have
memory we would be dull individual walking around.
All of our senses is bound to be connected to one another. That means all
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of our senses incorporate to memory. Smell, a taste, a particular voice or someone you’ve seen before can trigger our memories.
All of these are collected as memories and we can choose to react as a
good or bad response, or a positive or a negative reaction.
Causes of memory loss can derive from many aspects. In David T. Derrer “Memory
Loss”. Some things that cause memory loss are medication, Alcohol, Tobacco, or drug use.
Smoking can harm the memory by reducing the amount of oxygen that gets to the brain. Drugs
can interfere with the brain, thus making it hard to recall memory. Other causes can be based off
Lack of sleep, Depression, Stress, Nutrition deficiency, Head injury, or Stroke. When your mind
is tense you are overworked and distracted and your ability to remember suffers. Emotional
trauma caused by stress can also lead to memory loss. Nutritional deficiency in vitamin B2 and
B2 can also affect memory. There are endless possibilities of how memory can be loss, but there
is a chance to regain it back.
Rosemary essential oil has been traditionally used for many things in the past such as
medical use, food, and to ward off evil. In
As previously said memory can be triggered by any of our senses. Particularly by
Olfactory or smell. Sometimes a particular scent can bring back vivid memories. According
to Robert Tisserand “Sniffing Rosemary Can Increase Memory By 75%”. Researchers found that oil helps alertness and be attentive. Researchers also found that sniffing essential oil from the herb can enhance a person’s memory. Inhabiting them to remember to do things. Researchers also suggest that “ Volatile molecules from essential oils can be absorbed onto the bloodstream through the nose.” (Tisserand). The chemicals from the oil stimulate the olfactory nerve, which could be linked to the brain. Rosemary essential oil can amplify our mind functioning in vigorous adults, making them capable of remembering events and to complete future task.
When the body senses fear or danger the sympathetic nervous system stimulates the adrenal medulla to produce epinephrine and norepinephrine. This is known as the fight-or-fight response. The amygdala is also involved in forming memories and learning and can also detect stimuli that is threatening. If the stress response is prolonged the fight-or-fight response can become prolonged. Most people who are going through a stressful event, will get over it eventually but sometimes traumatic events can create long lasting, vivid memories that are known as flashbulb memories. When traumatic memories are intense and prolonged some people might develop PTSD, just like the patients in the articles. In people who have PTSD, they have anxiety, sleep disturbances, irritability, and have recurring memories of the traumatic events. Life is filled with many potential stressors, any situation can cause stress if a person doesn’t have the sources or the coping ability to get through the situation. Stress impacts the brain, research has shown that people who are under chronic stress have shorter telomeres. Stress also adds fat to the abdomen, and unravels chromosomes, reducing immune system functioning, and increases rick of
Atkinson, R.C. & Shiffrin, R.M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control process.
Memory loss-forgetting information really easy,Trouble planning and problem solving, Daily tasks,Times and places are confusing,Changes in Vision,Words and conversations are frustrating.Memory loss means forgetting information really easy. Trouble planning and problem solving turns tricky to follow a recipe, even one you’ve used many times. Is it hard to concentrate on detailed tasks that involves numbers. Daily tasks are a challenge ,familiar things can become hard. You have trouble driving to a location you go to often. Times and places are confusing get disoriented, get lost easily and forget where you are ,and how you got there.Changes in Vision makes it harder to read the words on the page.You have trouble judging distance,and can’t tell colors
One cause is benzodiazepine drugs, which are known to have powerful amnesic affects. This has also been recorded in non-benzodiazepine sedatives which act on the same set of receptors. Another cause is a traumatic brain injury in which damage is usually done to the hippocampus or surrounding cortices. It can also be caused by shock from psychological trauma or an emotional disorder. Illness, though much rarer, can also cause anterograde amnesia such as encephalitis, which is the inflammation of brain tissues do to some foreign pathogen. Lucy is diagnosed as having Goldfield’s Syndrome, which is the exact same thing as anterograde amnesia. She shows signs of short-term memory loss, her brain stores the new memories of the day has she lived however, after falling asleep she is unable to access these
Memory plays a significant role in the everyday lives of people of all ages. It allows them to recall information and remember skills that were learned in the past. Memory also organizes past information to help people make current and future decisions. However, imagine forgetting the names of close family members or not having the ability to find your keys every time you want to leave the house. These are some of the struggles that people with Alzheimer’s disease face daily. Alzheimer’s disease was first identified by German neurologist Alois Alzheimer in 1906, and was discovered to have an overpowering effect on explicit memory loss (Gruetzner, 1988). There are two types of Alzheimer’s disease – early onset and late onset. Early onset occurs in patients who are diagnosed before the age of 65 whereas late onset occurs in patients who are diagnosed after the age of 65. In the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, short-term memory is often lost. As Alzheimer’s disease progresses, problems with long-term memory begin to develop, in addition to short-term memory impairments. Although a lot is known about the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, the cause has not been conclusively identified. However, as research continues, new theories about the cause of Alzheimer’s disease are being proposed. This has led to a controversy over whether Alzheimer’s disease is caused by genetics or environmental influences (Gruetzner, 1988).
There is no actual cure for an amnestic disorder. But the person can go through therapy. Some things can speed up the rate at recalling their memory. Sometimes exposing the person to an item from their past can help jog their memory. In the movie “Memento”, Leonard takes pictures of people that he meets and makes notes about them on the back. As he is looking for his wife’s killer, he gets tattoos of important clues he receives, that way he will not
The second stage of memory processing is storage. Aronson et al. (2013) defines storage as the process by which people store the information they just acquired. Unfortunately, memories are affected by incoming information through alteration or reconstruction. This phenomenon is referred to as recon...
Traumatic brain injuries, ingestion of toxic substances that alter the brain, emotional distress, and hypoxia/ anoxia serve as the most common causes for amnesia. Traumatic brain injuries occur because of damage to brain tissue, such as concussions, alteration, lesions, and destruction of tissue. Due to complex neural connections and pathways, the severing of any of them is irreplaceable. Toxic substances could include many drugs such as alcohol or other illegal concentrated substances. When the brain receives inadequate oxygen, it suffers hypoxia, and when the brain cannot receive any oxygen, it undergoes
Bryan Willey Alzheimer’s disease Alzheimer’s is a progressive, degenerative disease of the brain and individuals with the disease suffer from many symptoms such as memory loss, agitation, impaired judgment, and difficulty communicating with others. The different lobes affected include the parietal lobe which deals with language, temporal lobe which deals with memory and frontal lobe which deals with behavior and judgment. The specific type of memory loss that an Alzheimer’s patient deals with is declarative memory. Declarative memory is remembrance of facts such as people’s names, what their faces look like and important dates from our past (Marieb and Hoehn 2013). The formation of these memories can only happen when the temporal lobe or more specifically the hippocampus are able to receive acetylcholine inputs.
Anterograde Amnesia (AA) is commonly known as short term memory loss. It is the inability to form any new memories after a neurological or psychological trauma in the brain. “Current definitions of anterograde amnesia emphasize the presence of severe and permanent deficits for the recall of recent events (typically with poor recognition) that contrast with intact short-term memory, IQ, semantic memory, skill learning, simple classical conditioning, perceptual learning, and priming” (Aggleton, 2008, p. 1442). Also, according to Aggleton, AA causes the inability to recall autobiographical events (episodic memory). Research shows that damage to the diencephalon or frontal lobe can cause AA. Damage to the diencephalon impairs memory performance because it encodes new experiences for future recall and damage to the frontal lobe of the brain weaken memory performance because the it is involved in regulates access explicit memory (Mendev 2007). Duff, Wszalek, Tranel & Cohen (2008) stated...
Amnesia, a severe long-term memory loss disease, is caused by damaged brain tissue. There are two different types of amnesia. Retrograde amnesia is also known as backward moving. This is when you have a hard time remembering the past, especially episodic memories. This occurs because of memory consolidation. Memory consolidation is the process of a new memory setting until it becomes permanently in the brain. If this process is disrupted, the memory may be lost (Hockenberry and Hockenberry page 265). Anterograde amnesia is also known as forward moving. This is when you are unable to form new
Memory refers to storage, for example, our thoughts, knowledge, past experience, retention and recalled information is part of our cognitive mapping. It depends on a person state of mind that’s specific information varies to the content of the information itself. Needless to say, information that is considered interesting, or exciting seems to be better remembered than information that is boring or uninterested. Usually, if information has failed adequately store than the memory can normally result as failure as well. Which means if the storage of information fails to retain (forgetting) or if failure to retrieve the person’s memory fails altogether. The neurons produce activity in other neurons which overtime will be strengthened, that is known to be located inside a person’s long-term potentiation. (Meyers,
Since memory is a puzzling part in the brain, it has been studied over the years.
As brain systems begin working, memory also starts to work. (4). The aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid afor I am intrigued by the fact that short-term memory can work independently of long-term memory. While long-term memory can be achieved through the repetition of a fact that is in the short-term memory, it appears that in amnesiac patients their long-term memory tends to return faster than their short-term memory. They can remember their favorite childhood food, but cannot remember why they are in the hospital.
The limbic system is associated with emotional behavior, long-term memory, and olfaction. Your sense of smell is the first and most primitive sense you use when you are born. It helps newborns to recognize their parents. Our sense of smell is intertwined with our memories formed in our brain.