We do know that we are who we are but, from the psychological point of view, how can this assertion of a personal identity be explained? Locke's statement seems to say that we form our 'selves' with our critical skills and experiences. These are functions that are performed using our brain and thus memory. But how does our memory help us form a sense of self concept? Do people with impaired memories have a defective self? The personal identity or the self concept that each of us possess has its usefulness. It allows us to justify our existence physically, and mentally (Minsky, 1988).
Physical actions like walking and talking only take place using our bodies because they allow us the capacity to do so, and similarly we process a wide array of information using our mind as an interpreter. How it interprets that information is a distinct quality. And the mode of interpretation (memory functions) can be linked to the self concept in a possibly symbiotic relationship. A standard memory model such as the Atkinson Shiffrin model can be used to show how different components of memory support the presence of a self concept.
The Atkinson Shiffrin model consists of the sensory, working (short term) and long term memory systems. Sensory memory allows us to reproduce information (iconic, echoic, haptic) in its original form by paying attention to our surroundings, to be worked with in the short term memory. The influence of the self on our sensory memory can be demonstrated by the cocktail party effect, where a person registers his name spoken amid all sorts of conversations around even though he may not be particularly paying attention to every conversation around him.Emotional states of the self may affect how our sensory memory is working, for example a depressed person may be more attentive to negative cues around him, except that they are not that prominent at all (Nurius, 1993).
The working memory in the same model infers the information fed to it by the sensory memory and it is said to maintain the working self. This is a set of data about the self that is coherent with the information being processed in the working memory (Nurius, 1993). For example it will consist of a self which is happy and playful when at a birthday and sad, caring and hurt at a funeral.This 'working' self bases itself on information from the long term memory database of the self, which is a result of the autobiographical memories of a person. The long term memory of a person consists of episodic, semantic and procedural memories. The meanings attached to all these memories vary from person to person relevant to their self concepts.
A person may have an episodic memory of a wedding by the bad confrontations that he had at the event, whereas another might remember it because of the extra ordinary amount of joy he experienced.Someone with a lot of bad confrontations in his life may be a rude person, where as an affable person would have a lot of episodes of fun and happiness. Procedural memories allow the self to achieve goals and explain certain attributes. Like the need to drive to get somewhere, good or bad skills at playing the piano, being a reckless or calm driver.
Episodes experienced by a person throughout his life allow him to have an autobiographical memory, which is the knowledge of his own history. These memories establish him as the type of person he is, reinforcing his attributes with memories from his past and how he acted over his lifetime.His self concept bases itself on his experiences through these memories. It is these memories that shape his thought process, the way he interprets information, they way he acts and responds to stimuli presented to him. Not only does the self base itself on his autobiographical memories, they too become congruent to explain the self (Conway, 2001). A study shows that people tend to draw support from their memories to support their self concepts.
This may involve alteration of memories, repression or completely false memories (Ross, 1989).For example, a person who has been a failure in academia, relationships and professions won't have much high hopes of a new job that he's taking because his self concept draws on his past failures to not have high expectations, or expectations at all in an extreme case such as this. Repression of those memories however would make it easier for him to motivate himself with some sort of optimist outlook. This was shown in an experiment, where repression was studied to come to the conclusion that people who repress the negative effects of their memories tend to be less pessimistic (Myers ; Steed, 1999).
The need for Autobiographical memory and the self to be linked to each other is emphasized by observations by of schizophrenic patients who are not able to relate their selves to their memories (Baddeley et al. , 1996). Instead they would have unreal ideas about themselves that they would support with false autobiographical memories. The correct memories were still accessible but couldn't be used to form a self concept so the patients would resort to false memories to relate their ideas about themselves to, despite the presence of accessible memories.Besides Autobiographical memory, several people with brain damage have been studied for personality changes. One example would be Phineas Gage who lost most of his left frontal lobe in 1848 when an iron rod went through his left cheek bone and came out of his head.
He was able to recover from the injury and function normally after it, except that he went through a complete personality change. He wasn't able to get his old job back, even though he was exceptional at it. "He had become fitful, irreverent, grossly profane, and showed little deference for other workers.Impatient and obstinate yet capricious and vacillating, he was unable to proceed with any plans.
According to friends he was "no longer Gage"" (Haas, 2001). The frontal lobe is known to be active in a memory function that acts like a will over our actions (SAS), signs of its absence would be loss of control over one's actions and the inability to carry out a series of tasks together, visible in the post accident personality of Gage. There are other cases of the self concept being affected by memory damage, research has also been done on how certain compositions memory structures may lead to particular results in a self concept.For example, a study shows when the brain activity of a group of murderers were studied , it was observed that the brain structure had " left lower than right asymmetries in the amygdale, thalamus, and hippocampus coupled with dysfunction of the corpus callosum and left angular gyrus". According to the report, this combination of alterations in the brain function and structure hadn't been reported before and could result in the inclination towards violence (Raine, Buchsbaum ; Lacasse, 1997).
Despite the study having its limitations, this is an example how the structure of the memory system can influence a person's actions. A memory system without any anomalies would support an accurate self concept that provides the link between the physical person and his memories. How his memories make him the way he exists or how his existence influences his memory to function in a certain way. Both are dependent on each other to function and even though they may not be a single entity, they allow each of us to exist individually.
