Mind/Brain/Behavior Undergraduate Colloquium:
Knowledge and Reality
Tuesday, November 25,2008
Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall
4 to 6pm
Colloquium Purpose:
This colloquium is designed to give a flavor of the issues and perspectives researchers and students address within the Harvard MBB community, and to give students interested in MBB the opportunity to meet each other. Seniors and juniors who have joined an MBB track or the MBB secondary field, sophomores and first-years who are considering these options, and any students interested in mind/brain/behavior and the colloquium topics are all welcome at this event.
Colloquium Theme:
Normally, our perceptions lead to knowledge. When we see the street, the stoplight, the cars, we take ourselves to know what's around us and what we should do (stop at the red light, don't walk in front of moving traffic). Since we rely so heavily on the feeling of knowing in daily life, disorders involving the feeling are seriously disruptive. You can feel that you know when you don't - as in the pathological certainty of the deluded. Or you can fail to feel that you know, when circumstances normally would result in knowledge – as in amnesia, or refusal to believe one's eyes. This symposium will discuss two such pathologies: narcolepsy and disorders of working memory. In narcolepsy, the normal momentary confusion over the reality of our dreams, often felt when we first awaken, can become persistent beliefs in events that never occurred. In some disorders of working memory, the feeling of knowing is not there when it should be; in others, it is there when it shouldn't be.
Talk One: Memory and Reality in Memory Disorders
Daniel L. Schacter
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology (FAS)
Changes in brain function can result in various kinds of memory disorders, ranging from neuropsychological syndromes that occur after brain damage to changes associated with normal aging. This talk will consider changes in the accuracy and distortion of memory as a consequence of aging and brain injury, and discuss how such changes inform our understanding of the relation between memory and reality.
Talk Two: Dreaming and Waking: Whither Way Reality?
Robert Stickgold
Associate Professor of Psychiatry (HMS) (FAS)
We still know remarkably little about the nature, function, and neural mechanisms of dreaming. But we know even less about how dreams are recalled during waking, and how such recall differs from recall of waking events. Two questions that remain unanswered are, first, why do we almost always believe that we are awake when we are dreaming (despite all the objective evidence that what we are experiencing couldn’t possibly be true), and, second, after we wake up, how do we distinguish our dream memories from our memories of actual events from our waking lives? We do know quite a bit about how sleep contributes to the ongoing processing of our memories, strengthening some, altering others, identifying the most salient aspects of memories and integrating them into larger networks of older, associated memories, and, in the process, creating dreams. Our growing knowledge of these processes provide tantalizing hints as to both the function of dreaming and how we keep our dream life separate from our waking life, at least most of the time. In concluding, I’ll suggest how narcolepsy, a unique sleep disorder with a known genetic and molecular basis, may provide additional clues into these mysteries. Most likely, I’ll fail to answer either of my two original questions convincingly, but I’m sure we’ll have fun along the way!
Colloquium Organizers:
- Albert Galaburda
Emily Fisher Landau Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School
- Edward Kravitz
George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
- Susanna Siegel
Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University
- Robert Stickgold
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School