Think of memory as a large house with limited storage space. There are a lot of rooms but few closets. The goal is not to fill every corner but to select significant and valuable elements to put on display. Some items are in long term storage but the majority of the resources are to facilitate daily living.
Memory is vital to daily living, and always has been so. Knowing where the Saber Tooth Tiger lives is important information. It is in the best interests of your survival to be able to store and retrieve the proper information at the right moment in time. Tigers tend not to wait while you ponder the matter or shuffle through your notes to find the right answer.
Memory is not a single item. It is a collection of systems. Some systems hold sensory data for a short period of time. They act as buffers. Their purpose is to hold the data long enough to be useful but long enough to disrupt the input of vital information.
Some systems are for storing stories about yourself, your family, and what you did last summer. Facts are like canned goods. They are stored as long as they are useful but are discarded when their expiration dates come.
There are three essential components you should consider: encoding, storage and decoding. Encoding is the process of getting things into you head. Mnemonics and other strategies try to improve encoding. You repeat the word or phrase over and over, you create interactive images, you divide long strings of digits into smaller chunks, all to get it into your brain.
There isn’t much talk about storage. It just works. It’s not clear how or where things are stored but once things are in your head they are safe.
Decoding (retrieval) is getting things back out. This usually works isn’t always easy. Sometimes we forget where we filed it. Sometimes we misfile information. Sometimes it seems to be on the tip of our tongue but not quite there. There are a few retrieval tricks but mostly we assume decoding will be easy.
You should take a class in memory to understand how your brain works well and how it stops working (Alzheimer’s and other disorders).
Here is a catalog style description of the course:
Explores classic and modern theories of human memory. Topics include declarative and implied varieties , mnemonics, and disorders, disabilities and dementia. Special attention made to designing and critiquing research approaches.
Here is what it really means:
You’ll gain a better understanding of memory systems and how they work. You won’t be any better at memorizing a deck of cards, but you’ll know how it is done.
There is a lot to cover, so let’s start with learning more about systems.
Memory Systems
Want to jump ahead?
- Memory Systems
- Declarative Memory
- Implicit Memory
- Memory Processes
- Forgetting
- Mnemonics
- Memory Stability
- Memory Instability
- Consolidation
- Memory Disorders
Resources
Summary
Photo by Nick Romanov on Unsplash
