DAY 1

What would life be like with no memory?

How would you answer the question: how are you today?

With no memory who would you be? How would your identity be affected?

Raise your hand if you can recite the second sentence of the Pledge of Allegiance?

The cognitive revolution in psychology that occurred in the 1960’s and 1970’s helped dethrone behaviorism as the dominant perspective in psychology. One of the driving forces in this cognitive revolution was the application of computer models to behavior and mental processes.

Be thankful for memory. We take it for granted, except when it malfunctions. But it is our memory that enables us to recognize family, speak our language, find our way home, and locate food and water. It is our memory that enables us to enjoy an experience and then mentally replay and enjoy it again.

Our shared memories help bind us together as Irish or Australian, as Serbs or Albanians. And it is our memories that occasionally pit us against those whose offenses we cannot forget.

In large part, you are what you remember. Without memory, your storehouse of accumulated learning, there would be no savoring of past joys, no guilt or anger over painful recollections. You would instead live in an enduring present, each moment fresh. But each person would be a stranger, every language foreign, every task—dressing, eating, biking—a new challenge. You would be a stranger to yourself.

You would lack that continuous sense of self that extends from your distant past to your elementary present.

“If you lose the ability to recall your old memories then you have no life.” You might as well be a rutabaga or a cabbage.

How do you define the word memory…what do you think?

Memory is persistence of learning over time through the storage and retrieval of information.

Research on memory’s extremes has helped us understand how memory works. At age 92 my father suffered a small stroke that had one peculiar effect. His genial personality was intact. He was as mobile as before. He knew us and while poring over family photo albums could reminisce in detail about his past. But he had lost his ability to lay down new memories of conversations and everyday episodes. He could not tell what day of the week it was. Told repeatedly of his brother-in-law’s death he expressed surprise each time he heard the news.

To remember any event, we must get information into our brain (encoding), retain that information (storage) and later get it back out (retrieval).

Atkinson and Shiffrin proposed that we form memories in three stages:

1) We first record to-be-remembered information as a fleeting sensory memory.

2) From there, we process information into a short-term memory bin, where we encode it through rehearsal.

3) Finally, information moves into long-term memory for later retrieval.

Please read the following poem:

Spring is the The most beautifulTime of the year.

Without conscious effort you automatically process information about:

Space: While studying you often encode the place on a page or in your notebook where certain material appears; later, when struggling to recall that information you may visualize it’s location.

Time: While going about your day, you intentionally note the sequence of the day’s events. Later, when you realize you’ve left your backpack somewhere you can re-create that sequence and re-trace your steps.

Frequency: You effortlessly keep track of how many times things happen, thus enabling you to realize, “this is the third time that I’ve run into her today.”

Well-Learned Information: For example, when you see words in your native language, perhaps on the side of a delivery truck, you cannot help but register meanings.

Deciphering words was not always so easy. When you first learned to read you sounded out individual letters to figure out the words they made. With effort, you plodded slowly through 20-50 words on a page. Reading requires attention and effort, but over time becomes automatic.

We encode and retain vast amounts of information automatically, but we remember other types of information only with effort and attention. Effortful Processing often produces durable and accessible memories.

When learning novel information, such as vocabulary terms, we can boost our memory through rehearsal, or conscious repetition.

Ebbinghaus is the thinker associated with this concept. He used 3 letter combinations such as JIH, BAZ, FUB, YOX, to prove his point.