Big Brain

BIG BRAIN

Hello! My birthday is January 20th so my super hero uses the hippocampus (in charge of memory like retrieving declarative memories and changing short-term memories to long-term memories) and dopamine (regulates attention, learning, and emotional responses) to fight crime. Here is my hero's back story...

In a small town outside of Seattle, there was a girl named Chelsea who had no idea what was in store for her. One day, she was studying for a 500 term vocabulary test and she was so stressed out! How would she memorize all these terms in such a short amount of time? She had no clue, so her only logical answer was to go to her family farm's giant corn field and pray. Upon arriving, she felt a little weird... it was like someone was watching her. Looking around, she saw no one but her and corn. Then suddenly a giant UFO landed in the corn field and abducted her! The aliens did experiments on her brain to try and understand how humans could be so stupid. They decided to help Chelsea out since they were disgusted of her little human brain by boosting the dopamine production to her hippocampus giving her photogenic memory and super-speed learning. However, since the
aliens had the beauty standard of having big brains, they gave Chelsea an enlarged skull, which produced the iconic name, Big Brain.

The Hippocampus

Her enhanced memory allows Big Brain to memorize things quickly by transferring them from short-term to long-term memory with the help of dopamine, which causes her to be able to focus. Now Big Brain travels across the country to stop crime. She dreamt of becoming a world class detective due to her quick processing abilities; however, her head is too big to fit in a detective cap, so she gave up on that career. Today, her most notable work includes memorizing the car plate numbers of escaping criminals. 

Big Brain's night and day look

Here is an article about the relationship between dopamine and the hippocampus:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5489110/

Meet the Somebodies super hero team! (click the names to learn more!)

BioHero

Smiley Beater

Tictalker

Memory

Today in psych class we were asked to take various memory tests. 

My first test was the penny test where I had to decide which among many pennies was a real penny (they removed or added components like the year of creation etc.). I picked the correct answer; however, I don't think this test necessarily checks memory rather it checks observational skills. I for one have never really looked at a penny to tried to remember its various aspects and I'm sure some have never even really paid attention to what a penny really looks like. Honestly I just felt like the other pennies looked weird from a design point of view (ex. the date was moved too close to the edge of the penny ) and so my choice is not exactly memory based.

This was a test to see how well I could remember faces and I thought it was kind of valid. Of course validity depended on how long you looked at the given face. I got the face correct, but I did look at it for quite some time.

This test gave me a list of words to memorize. I created a story out of the words which allowed me to remember them better. According the the website 9/12 is an average score. This test is pretty valid but again there was no limit on time spent memorizing.

I found this article about the mind's capacity of remembering faces.

https://www.livescience.com/63830-people-remember-5000-faces.html