I think it's helpful to clarify what is meant by explicit and implicit, because it's confusing - especially because you can have explicit recall of implicit memories. And there are a couple of different kinds of implicit memories - one is the kind of implicit learning which comes from practicing a skill (which doesn't apply here) and another is a memory which forms without awareness. Dreams can help to understand the difference.
You're sleeping at night and you wake up to the sound of your neighbor's house alarm. The next morning you ask your neighbor about it, and they tell you it was a false alarm. That would be an explicit memory/recall.
You're sleeping at night and you have a dream about your alarm clock going off, and in the dream you panic about missing your flight. The next morning you are chatting with your neighbor about your dream. Your neighbor mentions that they had a false alarm during the night. Your dream would be an implicit memory of your neighbor's false alarm (it stimulated the dream, but you didn't have explicit awareness of the alarm going off), but your recall of that dream would be explicit.
I'm curious about how Parnia actually tested for implicit learning. He mentioned that 1 of 19 subjects recalled the audio stimuli, which sounds like he asked for an explicit memory. You have to do something different to test for implicit learning. For example, asking people to complete a word when given some initial letters or verbally asking people to spell a word which happens to be a homophone. Implicit learning would lead to people more likely to complete some initial letters with an implicitly learned word, or choose to spell the implicitly learned homophone (for example, if the phrase "their children are sad" was repeated during the CPR and they were later asked to spell "thehr", they would be more likely to choose "t h e i r", than "t h e r e". It is unfortunate that he does not provide the justification behind his statement that there were "no signs of implicit learning".
Examples of implicit memories in the pool of blinded, prospectively studied experiences would be recalling arms and legs so heavy that they couldn't move and being pursued by the IRA, when what happened was an Irish doctor whispering in a patient's ear to help calm her while five workers held her down when she became combative. Or recalling people in uniforms with swastikas, later recognized as doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers.
Linda
(This post was last modified: 2019-12-17, 05:52 PM by fls.)
You're sleeping at night and you wake up to the sound of your neighbor's house alarm. The next morning you ask your neighbor about it, and they tell you it was a false alarm. That would be an explicit memory/recall.
You're sleeping at night and you have a dream about your alarm clock going off, and in the dream you panic about missing your flight. The next morning you are chatting with your neighbor about your dream. Your neighbor mentions that they had a false alarm during the night. Your dream would be an implicit memory of your neighbor's false alarm (it stimulated the dream, but you didn't have explicit awareness of the alarm going off), but your recall of that dream would be explicit.
I'm curious about how Parnia actually tested for implicit learning. He mentioned that 1 of 19 subjects recalled the audio stimuli, which sounds like he asked for an explicit memory. You have to do something different to test for implicit learning. For example, asking people to complete a word when given some initial letters or verbally asking people to spell a word which happens to be a homophone. Implicit learning would lead to people more likely to complete some initial letters with an implicitly learned word, or choose to spell the implicitly learned homophone (for example, if the phrase "their children are sad" was repeated during the CPR and they were later asked to spell "thehr", they would be more likely to choose "t h e i r", than "t h e r e". It is unfortunate that he does not provide the justification behind his statement that there were "no signs of implicit learning".
Examples of implicit memories in the pool of blinded, prospectively studied experiences would be recalling arms and legs so heavy that they couldn't move and being pursued by the IRA, when what happened was an Irish doctor whispering in a patient's ear to help calm her while five workers held her down when she became combative. Or recalling people in uniforms with swastikas, later recognized as doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers.
Linda
