There’s an old adage that psychologists study their own deficiencies: I study the psychology of memory. At times in the past, I was able to discourse fluidly on obscuranta ranging from the internals of software for text processing, Wildean views of suffering, or conspiracy theories behind the construction of the Egyptian pyramids… few wanted to […]
[Back to Research] For my thesis, I worked on a series of behavioral and fMRI memory experiments to understand a little more about forgetting, called ‘Weakening memories by half-remembering them’ (PDF). Here’s the gist. The act of remembering something – dredging it up from your memory and letting it blossom fully into a recollection – is […]
In a not-so-distant dystopia, you might be placed in a brain scanner to test whether you’re telling the truth. Here’s how to cheat. The polygraph First, you’ll need some background on old-school lie-detection technology. [This is a simplified story – see polygraphs for a richer account.] Polygraphs are seismographs for the nervous system. They measure […]
Greg Detre 