RUNNING HEAD: THE IMPORTANCE OF MEMORY 1

Neuroscience and the Importance of Memory

Caitlin Harrison

01/03/2023

Author’s Note

Neuroscience and the field of neurology are necessary in order to both better understand

the brain and help those who suffer from mental disorders. Having had my own experience with

a family member suffering from dementia-related memory loss, I decided to focus my senior

project on how memory functions in the brain. Through familial connections, I was able to get in

touch with my mentor, the neurologist Dr. Robert Mitchell of Atrium Health in Charlotte, North

Carolina, and with his help, I was able to achieve my goals for my senior project. During my

shadowing, I was taught a lot about how the brain functions from Dr. Mitchell personally,

however I was unable to see patients due to COVID restrictions. North Carolina had seen a spike

in COVID cases over the summer of 2022, restricting my shadowing experience to the point

where most of my learning was contained in one or two rooms. Although my experience was

more limited than those of my fellow classmates’, I was still able to learn a lot about the human

brain, and I was able to put together what I had learned into an educational video, which I later

posted on my YouTube channel, C a i t, so it could reach my desired audience.

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Introduction

Dementia is one of the most devastating diseases for those over 65 years of age with 55

million people currently suffering from it worldwide (World Health Organization, 2022). Among

the different types of dementia, Alzheimer’s is the most common form, and it currently has no

cure. Recent research into the disease found a way to remove the amyloid plaque build up in the

brain thought to cause the disease, but this instead proved amyloid plaque wasn’t the cause of

Alzheimer’s, making the research a fruitless effort (Hamilton, 2022). With no complete cure

available for the disease, and with more and more people being diagnosed by the day, I became

interested in researching how the disease works in the first place. This train of thought then later

led me to researching memory, which formed the foundation for my senior project.

I first acquired an interest in neuroscience after my grandfather passed away on

December 23rd, 2020. He had early-onset Alzheimer’s, which is a variant of the disease that

occurs before the afflicted has passed 65 years of age, and I spent most of my life not really

knowing who my grandfather truly was. He had been diagnosed when I was five years old, so I

do not have much of a memory of what his personality was like before the disease. The regret I

felt over that lack of knowledge only grew as the years passed, since my grandfather’s behavior

would only get worse, and I had no idea what was happening to him. All I understood was that

the disease was somehow at fault, since everyone else kept on saying that my grandfather was

behaving differently than he would if he was in his right mind. Even up until the day my

grandfather died, I did not understand what had been happening to him, and I wanted to change

that.

So, I began looking into how memory works within the human brain. I looked into the

various memory types, how memories were stored, how different variations of amnesia were
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classified, and I found myself naturally growing more curious about neuroscience as a whole. I

then reached out to my late-grandfather’s neurologist, Dr. Robert Mitchell, for shadowing, and I

made plans to shadow him for two weeks at Atrium Health in North Carolina. Unfortunately,

COVID restrictions in NC kept me from meeting patients or going on rounds with Dr. Mitchell;

however, I still learned a lot about the brain through university lectures, various books, radiology

scans, and from Dr. Mitchell himself. The brain is an extremely complex organ within our bodies

that scientists are only beginning to understand, but through my shadowing, I was able to better

understand the fundamentals of how memory functions, along with just how important each

section of the brain is to our everyday lives.

What I Knew/What I Wanted to Know

Before my shadowing experience, I had managed to do quite a bit of independent

research, with all of it eventually culminating in my quarter 4 project for STEM in junior year.

Due to my personal experience with my grandfather, I knew that memory deteriorated overtime

and that, eventually, the afflicted would forget normal bodily functions, like swallowing, which

would cause the person to pass away. I also researched what the lobes of the brains were called

and some of their basic functions: the frontal lobe allows for decision making, the parietal lobe

receives information from the senses, the temporal lobe is in charge of learning and memory, and

the occipital lobe helps interpret visual information (Penttila, 2022). Using this information I

gained during my junior year, I decided to create a model of a brain with severe Alzheimer’s for

my Q4 project. I began looking into how Alzheimer’s affects the brain physically, and the results

were more catastrophic than I could have imagined.

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The disease causes neuron death within the brain and the shrinkage of brain tissue,

usually beginning in the temporal lobe before spreading to other areas. The original location of

the disease explains why memory is usually the main symptom doctors look for when diagnosing

patients with Alzheimer’s; however the disease does not just focus on memory, as I had

originally thought. The disease eventually spreads to almost every section of the brain, which

explains why everyday activities become so difficult for those afflicted. I made my model based

on my findings, and I quickly realized that, although there was a great amount of destruction of

the temporal lobe in the final product, there was also a large amount of damage to the frontal

lobe in the ending stages of the disease as well. I began to realize just how horrifying

Alzheimer’s truly is, and that realization only made me want to dig deeper.

For my shadowing experience with Dr. Mitchell, I wished to learn a lot more about

memory itself. I wished to know how it was created, classified, and stored, along with examples

of those classifications. I also wanted to learn more about brain anatomy so that I could better

understand the radiology scans, also known as brain scans, I would be seeing during my

shadowing experience. With those questions in my head, and the research of junior year under

my belt, I went into my shadowing experience, hoping to better understand the human brain at

the end of it all.

The Story of My Search

I began shadowing my late grandfather’s neurologist, Dr. Mitchell on June 20th, 2022

after meeting him through my grandmother, and he started off the shadowing by giving me a tour

of the hospital. The plan was for me to shadow Dr. Mitchell for two weeks, one being the week

of June 19-24th, and the other being the week of July 24-29th. Due to the ample amount of time,
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the two of us were hopeful that COVID restrictions would lift and I would be able to see patients

during my second week, making the tour information and basic hospital layout important.

However, this ended up not being the case, and Dr. Mitchell and I spent a lot of our shadowing

staying in one location. During that first week, I received a crash course on brain anatomy and

embryology, the latter of which being the science of how the embryo forms and develops in the

womb. I originally did not see the connection between embryology and neuroanatomy; however,

I quickly learned that how the brain is formed in the womb actually dictates how certain areas of

the brain are classified.

While the brain is being formed in utero, or in the uterus, it curls into something akin to a

C shape, causing the middle part of the brain, the area nearest to the ventricles, to be known as

the old cortex, with the outside of the brain referred to as the neocortex, or the new cortex

(Norden, 2007). This helped me with understanding the different sections of the brain, as the two

are formed with different layers and matter types. Radiology scans show white matter and dark

matter differently, so it is important to understand the type of cortex one is looking at when

viewing a scan, and this is only possible if the scan viewer knows about embryology. Learning

this let me better understand radiology scans later on in the shadowing, since I was able to read

and interpret what was being shown. Along with this, I was also taught the importance of

understanding neuroanatomy itself before seeing brain scans. The doctors and medical

technicians that see the scans on a daily basis have to be able to understand whether there is an

injury, what lobe the injury is in, and what function the injury is impairing, so knowing

neuroanatomy is fundamental. For instance, if a patient had white matter decay around their

ventricles on a scan of their brain, the radiologist would be able to tell that the ventricles of the

brain had shown up much larger on the scans than they would have on a healthy person (UC San
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Diego School of Medicine). Similarly, if someone came in with a TBI and damage was visible on

the occipital lobe (the back of the brain), then a radiologist could determine that the patient may

have issues with image recognition or focus as a result of the injury.

The first week placed a great importance on neuroanatomy and embryology, and I ended

up going home with multipleDVDs of neuroanatomy lectures at Vanderbilt in order to keep my

memory of the material fresh before my next week of shadowing. Given the unfortunate news

that I would not be able to see patients during my second week, Dr. Mitchell and I made a plan

for me to see brain scans and learn more from him one-on-one. I was taught about the different

types of memory, along with how memories are formed in the first place.

Memory itself is made up of hundreds of neuron connections called synapses, and those

connections change over time as the brain matures (Takeuchi, 2014). For instance, if a five year

old child was asked what they thought of when they heard the word “house”, they may imagine a

drawing of a house. Meanwhile, an adult asked the exact same question would likely imagine the

house they currently live in. With the different types of memory, there are two large overarching

categories of memory that branch off into many different subcategories (American Psychiatric

Association, 2013). The first two branches of memory are explicit and implicit memory. Implicit

is essentially muscle memory, as it splits off into the categories of procedural and priming

memory. Procedural is everyday activities or sequences that a body remembers doing, while

priming is a body’s reaction to a stimulus it recognizes. Explicit is the memory most people

immediately think of, and it splits into the semantic and episodic categories. Semantic memory is

the memory of meanings and facts, while episodic is memories of specific events that a person

has gone through. Episodic memory can be further broken down into short term and long term

memory.
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Short term memory is defined as memories that are held continuously in the

consciousness for a very brief period of time, defined as about 40 seconds. Long term memory

can be retained for longer than a minute, and it can also be further broken down into anterograde

and retrograde long term memory when talking in terms of memory loss. Anterograde long term

memory loss is defined as an impaired ability in learning new information after a certain

moment, likely when the injury occurred, while retrograde long term memory loss is defined as

the loss of memory from before a certain moment in time. These memory types help with the

diagnosing of different types of amnesia, and they are often used by neurologists when

diagnosing patients.

However, a patient cannot simply be diagnosed by a symptom of memory loss. During

my last day shadowing Dr. Mitchell, I was introduced to the neurological tests neurologists tend

to give to patients when assessing them for a neurological disorder or injury. These two tests

were the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA) and the Mini-Mental State Examination

(MMSE), with the MMSE being known for being the easier test of the two. Both make patients

undergo tests that require them to do certain actions, like remembering a set of words, following

basic directions like moving their hand onto a desk or closing their eyes, being able to draw

everyday objects, describing animals, and creating sentences. For the MMSE, a person is deemed

“mild” if they answer greater than or equal to 21 questions correctly, while for the MOCA, a

person is only deemed “normal” if they managed to correctly answer 26 or more. I took both of

these tests, and through that experience, I got to better understand what those suffering from a

neurological ailment were not able to do. The reason I was tested on how I could draw a clock or

how well I could count backwards from 100 was because not being able to do those two things is

indicative of an illness, and that was really enlightening to me.

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Lastly, I was taught how the personality of a person gets affected by the devastation

caused by Alzheimer’s. In a Vanderbilt lecture DVD, Dr. Mitchell had lended me called

Understanding the Brain, The Great Courses, I learned about the various behavioral symptoms

associated with the disease. Alzheimer’s can cause those afflicted to be depressed, more prone to

violence, unable to take care of themselves, and essentially revert them to shells of their former

selves. This last bit of information, attained thanks to materials from my shadowing, allowed me

to finally better understand my grandfather, especially when paired with all that I had learned

from Dr. Mitchell. The neuron death from Alzheimer’s caused my grandfather’s memories and

basic associations to be lost, and the destruction of the various lobes in his brain led to a negative

personality change that he could not control. I was finally able to understand why he had

changed the way he did, and I quickly realized that others needed to know what I had learned.

My shadowing experience, albeit limited by COVID, taught me a lot about both the

human brain and memory. Returning from North Carolina, I grew excited to teach others and get

to work on my product. I wished to make an educational video on memory, and, although my

video would be accessible to all who wished to learn about the brain, my target audience would

be those who were like me in 2020. Those who were watching a loved one struggle through

dementia and desperately wanted to understand what had changed. I knew that simply the

knowledge of what happened physically to my grandfather had helped me, so I wished to spread

that knowledge. Afterall, everyone who has a loved one suffering from dementia deserves to

know that it’s not their fault, and they deserve to know exactly what has taken their loved one

from them.

Product
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My original plan was to make a live-action educational video for my product using the

green screen and filming equipment I have at home. However, this unfortunately did not work

out for me due to the time constraints of filming and my equipment breaking during the process.

While I was attempting to film, I quickly realized that I would have to memorize my script in

order to recite it all in front of a green screen, which was proving more time consuming and

difficult than I had initially anticipated. Furthermore, during this lengthy process, my tripod

keeping my phone up ended up breaking in a way that kept it from ever holding up a camera at a

180 degree angle ever again. If I had chosen to film anyways, the video would have been tilted

the entire way through, which would have no doubt distracted my audience.

Due to these issues, I ended up turning to a type of video I had done before; I decided I

would voice over my script and edit the video over my audio. This would not only let me finish

by the due date with the equipment I already had, but it was also a type of video I was used to

making due to past school projects. Thus, I set out on creating the video, eventually also deciding

to draw an avatar to represent myself, given how my actual face wouldn’t be appearing in the

final product. I edited the entire video using the software Movie Studio Platinum 12.0, adding a

survey at the end for feedback, before creating a quick Instagram story to promote the video and

posting it to my YouTube channel. My channel has over one thousand subscribers currently from

my middle school 3D animation days, so I believed my video would be able to reach a decent

audience quickly with minimal promotion. This ended up being inaccurate, likely due to the

video’s educational nature, so I needed to come up with a different plan. In the end, I decided to

share the video with my family and my friend groups on Discord, resulting in the video getting

70 views. The survey also received 13 responses, showing that the video had managed to reach
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an audience and receive enough feedback for me to begin reviewing whether my product had

been a success.

Results

The 13 responses to the feedback survey ultimately revealed my product to be successful,

with the overall consensus being overwhelmingly positive. Everyone reported an increase of

knowledge of memory after the video, with the only exception being an actual neurologist that

had found the video and stayed at the maximum knowledge during both polls. My only main

criticism of my product was that I had spoken too quickly, with most of my praise coming from

the material itself and how I had presented it. Overall, the ending rating of the video from an

educational standpoint was way more positive than I could have hoped, with almost all votes

being in the 1-2 range, with 1 being the best. My product had reached its audience and

successfully taught them more about my topic, reaching my goal and making all those hours I

spent editing worth it.

At the end of this project, while my product did end up being a success and my

shadowing was really enlightening, there are a few things that I wish I could have been able to

do if circumstances had been different. My shadowing experience had been severely limited by

COVID, keeping me from ever interacting with patients or going on rounds with the doctors at

Atrium Health. I managed to see two MRIs while doing my shadowing, however that was the

closest I ever got to interacting with a patient. I also do wish I could have been able to make my

video the way I had originally planned rather than resorting to old methods. I couldn’t have

predicted my tripod breaking, but that doesn’t keep me from having regrets over how differently

my product could have turned out. However, I still managed to learn what I needed to know and
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achieve my goal, so I count my senior project a success, even if I have some regrets after the

matter.

Those who follow after me should definitely take advantage of what can be done with

lighter COVID restrictions. I still managed to have an enjoyable experience; however I can only

imagine how enlightening a shadowing can be when those shadowing are allowed to meet with

patients personally. Future students should also keep on top of their workload. I’ve seen fellow

seniors around me struggling due to procrastination, and I also ended up pushing back a lot of

work until later on down the line during the whole senior project experience. However, all that

does is add more stress to students’ lives, even if the end product ends up coming out okay. The

panic that comes from pushing an assignment back is not worth the relaxation of pushing an

assignment off. Furthermore, from what I understand, procrastination can sink the ships of many

freshmen in college, so it’s better to nip that habit in the bud while one can.

After this experience, I have further solidified my decision to pursue a career in

neuroscience, eventually hoping to be a neurosurgeon. This senior project stayed interesting to

me the whole way through, solely due to my passion for what I was researching. I’d look through

countless studies, books, and lectures, and I’d end up getting fascinated with what I was

researching. I know for sure now that neuroscience is where my future lies, and, although I know

how often this is said to underclassmen, this just adds more proof to how important it is for

students to base their senior projects on concepts that are interesting to them. If I had chosen to

do a project on engineering or architecture instead of neuroscience, I would have dreaded the

amount of work that goes into this project. I wouldn’t have wanted to put in the hours, and every

second would have felt like torture to me.

Neuroscience is my passion, architecture isn’t, and it would’ve been incredibly painful

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for both me and my mentor had I gone with a subject that I clearly didn’t care about. Students

need to focus on what gets their minds going, rather than what sounds good on paper. I had no

idea I’d be interested in neuroscience back in middle school; I only found out how interested I

was in the subject through the research the Math & Science Academy made me do in the early

years of high school. My main takeaway from this is just how important it was for me to find that

subject I cared about, and I can only hope future students are able to do the same to ensure they

enjoy this project and senior year to its fullest. Every student only gets one senior year, one

senior project, so it would be a waste to spend those countless hours on a subject that is painful

for the student to research.

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American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental

disorders: Dsm-5.

Alzheimer's Society United Against Dementia. (2022, May 12). Mental and physical abilities in

the later stages. Alzheimer's Society. Retrieved December 18th, 2022, from

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rogresses/mental-and-physical-activities#:~:text=They%20may%20gradually%20lose%2

0their,balance%20problems%20and%20the%20environment.

Campbell, W. W., & Barohn, R. J. (2020). DeJong's the neurologic examination. Wolters Kluwer.

Hamilton, J. (2022, November 1). What causes Alzheimer's? Study puts leading theory to

'Ultimate test'. NPR. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/11/01/1133107703/alzheimers-study-tests

-amyloid-hypothesis.

Norden, J. (2007). Understanding the Brain. The Great Courses. Vanderbilt University School of

Medicine; Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

Penttila, N. (2022, August 11). Neuroanatomy: The basics. Dana Foundation. Retrieved

December 18, 2022, from https://www.dana.org/article/neuroanatomy-the-basics/.

Takeuchi et al. (2014, January 5). The synaptic plasticity and memory hypothesis:

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World Health Organization. (2022, September 20). Dementia. World Health Organization.

Retrieved December 18, 2022, from

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around%2055%20million%20people,and%20139%20million%20in%202050.