Transcript memory - Haiku

DAY 1

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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 beautiful
Time 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.
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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.
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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.