Hello, Anderson Smith again.

And today, we're going to talk about that first group

of descriptive psychological research methods case studies,

where we're looking at a single subject, a single person,

to gain some knowledge about what we are actually looking at.

Now, most studies in psychology are normative phenomena,

that is, we're looking at the behavior of large groups of people to understand

what the average individual would do.

But there are cases where we want to look at an in-depth description

of a person who has very unusual but psychology-relevant characteristics.

And that's when we use a case study.

Now, there are famous case studies in psychology.

For example, the most famous is Phineas Gage, who was, in the 18th century,

a railroad worker who was tapping a rod into the earth to create an explosive

with some explosive materials to create a railroad bed.

And when he tapped the rod in, he didn't know the explosive were already in the hole,

and the rod, as you can see in this diagram, went up through his cheek,

cut off his optic nerve, and came out to his frontal lobe of the brain.

And the interesting thing about Phineas Gage was he never lost consciousness.

He got up, even though the rod was 30 yards away,

and the skull was sitting there on the ground,

and his brain mass was all over the ground.

But he got up, and he walked away and never lost consciousness.

But we noticed that his personality really changed

because of this accident once he was sort of treated for the damage itself.

He was a very calm, very decision-making,

was actually a foreman working on a railroad and then, after the problem,

he became very- cannot make decisions, was very irritable,

a very different kind of person.

And so Phineas Gage has actually taught us

that personality has something to do with the frontal lobes of the brain.

Another famous case study,

and one we'll talk about in detail a bit later, is Henry Molaison.

And Henry Molaison, we know him as H.M.,

because when they're alive, you only know their initials,

told us a great deal, as an individual, about memory.

He actually had surgery when he was a young boy, in his teens, because he had epilepsy.

That sort of stopped the epileptic seizures,

and they actually did a bilateral lobectomy of the hippocampus

on both sides of his brain which are responsible for memory.

And when he woke up, the epileptic seizures were gone from the surgery.

He looked like he was normal, except he could not learn anything new.

His ability to form new memories, of experiences that he was having,

episodic memories, was lost.

Another famous case study is the Wild Boy of Aveyron,

who was a French boy that was found in the woods

and being raised by animals and had no language

and at an early pre-adolescence age had no human contact, as far as we know.

And many people described what he was like and what it was like trying to train him.

He never really fully learned language or other cognitive abilities.

Another famous case study was Kim Peek.

Kim peek was the idiot savant who had amazing abilities,

but he was actually had severe intellectual problems also.

And he was the person who was actually the basis of the film,

excuse me, Rain Man which is the movie that talked about his behavior.

Another case study is Little Albert, where Little Albert was a little child,

little infant, a toddler, who was the first

that Watson actually used to look at conditioning,

by training the kid to avoid fuzzy things including animals and his teddy bear.

By doing these horrible things, and he would generalize this fuzzy-looking face

of Watson to the fuzzy things that he liked previous to the conditioning.

Another case study, Chris Sizemore, was actually a Georgia resident,

treated in Milledgeville by Thigpen,

who had dissociative disorder where you have multiple personalities, and she had,

I think, four different personalities, Eve White,

Black Joan and a later one that came out.

And it was made into a movie with Joanne Woodward,

and actually she wrote a book called "I'm Eve"

which she talks about sort of an autobiographical account of her dissociative disorder.

What I want to do is talk about some specific kinds of case studies,

and the person that gave us the most case studies was Oliver Sacks, who died last year.

He actually wrote many books based on his observation

as a neurologist looking at brain damage in patients in a hospital.

One of my favorite books is "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" where he actually

had a patient that every time he left his office would try to put his wife on his head

because he couldn't distinguish between his hat

that he wore when he left the office and his wife.

And then, one of his most famous books is "Awakening" that was made into a movie in 1990,

with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams.

Robin Williams, playing Oliver Sacks, which showed patients that had been,

because of disease, comatose for their entire life,

most of their life since they were children, and then administering the drug L-Dopa,

awaken them, and now they are perfectly conscious and normal in the real world

and descriptions of what it was like dealing with these individuals.

Now I want to talk specifically about three different case studies

that deal with memory, and I told you my research area is memory.

Henry Moliason, I mentioned earlier,

and then two that are still alive, Jill Price and Joshua Foer.

And books about each one of them.

Brenda Milner wrote a book called "Permanent Present Tense"

about H.M. Jill Price wrote a book herself called "The Woman Who Can't Forget."

And then Joseph Foer wrote a book called "Moonwalking with Einstein."

And all these are very popular books that you can get from Amazon and other bookstores.

OK.

Henry Moliason was studied by Brenda Milner

and Suzanne Corkin at MIT and by 140 other people

who were neuroscientists and psychologists throughout his lifetime.

Remember, he could not remember new events or anything he experienced

after he lost his hippocampal areas through the bilateral lobectomy.

He couldn't remember.

So, Brenda Milner, who only saw him after he had this tragedy,

every time she walked in the room, she had to introduce herself,

even though she saw him every day for many, many months.

So he had a failure to encode into episodic memory,

the ability to remember things that happened in our past.

Interesting, though, his procedural memory,

which is a different kind of memory, an unconscious memory, was retained.

How you study that, well you had him draw a line between two stars

and do it while only looking in a mirror.

And if you ever tried the mirror drawing task, it's very difficult,

and it takes a long time to do it.

And H.M. would do it.

And over days and over weeks, he improved the same way that you and I would've improved

if we engaged in this memory tracing task.

But he never remembered the task.

Every day when he came in, you give him the mirror to start copying, mirror task,

you have to explain the whole task to him again because he couldn't remember the task,

but he was getting better with the unconscious procedural memory.

So H.M. taught us that there are different kinds of memory,

some controlled by the hippocampus and some not.

Episodic memory, procedural memory are very different, and H.M. had no episodic memory

but perfect procedural memory, even though he couldn't describe it.

Procedural memory is memory for procedures, like,

have you tried to describe how you ride a bicycle?

You know how to do it.

You learned how to do it.

But we have no cognitive awareness of what it is that we learned.

And this is just a picture of drawing that star through the mirror.

You can see this person is not doing very well, and most of us don't do very well.

Jill Price is actually a person that has hyperthymesia,

which is a diagnosis of someone that has an unbelievable photographic memory.

She actually was studied by Jim McGaugh,

psychologist in California, and she's still around.

She just wrote a book as I told you.

She can remember everything that happened to her since in the early 1980s,

when she was a young child.

Everything.

For example, you could ask for her to provide, give me the actual date for Easter

from 1980 to this year, and she could do it.

She recalled them easily and quickly.

I saw an interview of Jill Price by a television personality

where they ask her: What were the dates for the Rodney King beating,

the O.J. Simpson verdict, and the Atlanta bombing?

Without hesitation, she said March 3, 1991, October 3, 1995, July 26, 1996.

Amazing memory.

But different kind of case study for memory was Joshua Foer.

And Joshua Foer was a freelance science writer.

He graduated from Yale.

He wrote in things like National Geographic, Washington Post, New York Times,

and he would write things about science and submit them and had them published.

And he went, for one of his articles, to the National Memory Congress.

He didn't know that such things existed,

where they have a competition of who has the best memory.

And he went and saw that, and he's talked to one of these people,

and he found that they were just normal folks, they weren't like Jill Price.

They had learned techniques to help them remember, called mnemonic devices.

So maybe I can do that.

So, for a year, after he visited the National Memory Congress

and saw these mnemonist do this task and there are five tests : learning lines of a poem,

names and faces, digits, spoken words, and learning an order of a shuffled deck of cards.

He decided to deal with a shuffled deck of cards.

So one year working with a mnemonist, he developed a technique for doing that,

for remembering the deck of cards by just looking at them once in order.

And how fast you could do that was the tasks that they had to do.

Now, Joshua Foer wrote in The New York Times, "One of the most popular techniques

to memorize playing cards involves associating every card

with an image of a celebrity performing some sort of ludicrous --

and therefore memorable -- action on a mundane object."

So he would go into his house, method of loci, it's called The Memory Palace.

You should go into the house, and as you walk to the house having these identified places,

he would have the car that he owned.

And remember that say he learned them in order.

Walking through the house, he had 52 different places you could place an object.

And then he would learn some famous person doing a silly task,

like maybe Terry Bradshaw doing a wheelie in a wheelchair,

in that particular location in his house,

and he had already learned that that particular location was associated with a card,

like the eight of diamonds and so he'd learned this, so he had the locations

and the cards memorized, and he would develop

when he saw the card this ridiculous image of somebody doing something silly

in that particular place in this house.

And it could be something sexual or something really unusual,

they were better techniques, he claimed.

And he won by reproducing the shuffled deck of cards in one minute and 40 seconds.

Now, just, I looked at last year to see

what was the latest record in this card shuffling task.

And in the latest contest, in 2015, Lance Tschirhart learned 52 cards in 29 seconds.

I mean, I can't even go through a deck of cards in 29 seconds.

Amazing.

So three different kinds of case studies about memory.

That tells us a lot about memory about looking at the individual characteristics

that those people have.

So, in summary, case studies have strengths and they have weaknesses.

The strengths are that you get a detailed description of what it is you're studying,

and they're rare events.

They tell us something about the behavior that this person has,

even though they are very, very different from everyone else.

The weaknesses are: it has limited generalization, you're dealing with a very rare case.

It doesn't generalize to the population as a whole.

That's called external validity.

But even with that lack of external validity, the ability to generalize,

it does tell us something about the phenomenon

because that rare person has to be incorporated into a description

of what that behavior actually is.

And then, second, it's descriptive only.

And because it's descriptive, it's open to subjective knowledge.

We have to be careful to describe what we actually see and not use intuition

or other kinds of experiences to tell us what it is we're looking at.

So that's it for case studies.

Thank you.

Lesson 1D: Case Studies: Single Subject Studies

Descriptive Research Methods in Psychology

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