Total Recall
Assistant Professor of Psychology Azriel Grysman, outside Kaufman Hall, home of the Department of Psychology. Photo by Dan Loh.
OFFICE HOURS: Azriel Grysman, Assistant Professor of Psychology
by Tony Moore
Assistant Professor of Psychology Azriel Grysman earned his Ph.D. at Rutgers University. His research focuses on how memory is driven by a yearning to make meaning out of experiences and on using narrative methods to explore that meaning creation over time. His writing on the subject has appeared in such publications as the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, Applied Cognitive Psychology and Consciousness and Cognition.
What you study sounds like wonderfully complicated stuff—yet essential in working toward figuring out a big chunk of the human condition. Why should students come to Dickinson to figure out how to explore the intricacies of memory and how (and why) our experiences form them?
We call my field autobiographical memory, and I like to explain it as combining the cognitive processes underlying what we remember about ourselves in the context of who we are. Dickinson emphasizes community and global vision, and students come here looking to forge strong relationships in the context of those values. A sense of self is embedded in a sense of community, and students come here looking to be challenged in who they are in the greater context of culture.
Studying memory can aid in that process, as autobiographical memory work challenges students to reflect on their values as connected to their culture, especially in the context of encountering the other. By recognizing how our memories are shaped in daily interactions and in participating in culture and society, students can unite their values across different domains of their lives, seeing things in a new light as they take charge of their own development.
Memory has always fascinated me, probably mostly because I don’t have one that works very well. What about this field spoke to you in a way that made you want to make it your life’s work?
I studied psychology and history as an undergraduate, and memory combines a lot of aspects of both fields. What excited me most about history as an undergraduate was that professors were telling stories, not regurgitating facts. They were finding evidence in the strangest places—obscure documents, records of transactions, recovered poetry—to gain insight into what life must have been like in the period of inquiry. Guess what? When we remember, we sift through reams and gigabytes of data in our own minds as we recall, or often don’t recall, the past to create a representation who we are and how we got here.
In the field of memory, I can one day read neuroscience experiments showing me how the brain looks when making a memory error based on something another person said, and then the next day be reading personal stories from identical twins about a car accident they experienced together. The field is so diverse and the places where knowledge can be obtained so varied that being a memory scholar is like being at an all-you-can-eat buffet and never getting a stomachache.
And I bet your memory isn’t so bad. Our expectations for what we should remember are often way off, and living in a world with so much information, I don’t know how anyone keeps up.
What does research in the field of memory actually entail. (I envision people with wires coming out of their heads and a wall of monitors full of dreamy images. Close?)
Memory research has progressed dramatically from its origins, which were mainly about giving people lists of words, letters or images and then testing if they remembered them or not. In some labs, it now includes monitoring brain activity while following instructions to recall something (so yes, wires and monitors), or Professor Ben Basile, who is constructing behavioral tasks on the roofs and in the basements of Dickinson’s buildings to monitor memory in chickadees.
In my area, I ask people to describe specific life experiences and analyze the content of their responses (the narrative’s structure, its themes, how much they refer to facts, emotions, internal thoughts, specific events, background, etc.) and then link these patterns to outcome measures such as well-being, or to demographic factors, like gender and age. I also look at conversational factors—when two friends share a memory with each other, how does the interaction shape later recall? One new and exciting method I just started using (see Grysman et al., 2024) is to make narratives using ChatGPT and to see how people decide if a narrative was a real memory from a person or one generated by AI.
This is not an exhaustive list, and how memory is studied really depends on what questions interest the researcher. The methods are as varied as the questions one can ask.
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Published October 1, 2024