Sun, 08/01/2010
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How We Remember, and Why We Forget
June 2000
by Ashish Ranpura
I remember my mother's vegetable garden when I was a child, corn plants tall like skyscrapers. I remember when I fell out of a tree and everyone from the neighbor's barbecue rushed over to see if I'd broken a bone. Remember, remember... the verb itself is poetic, connotating the essence of experience. The notion of memory is so intriguing that we've come up with more metaphors for it than for any other mental phenomenon. Early theories predicted a memory "engram," a literal text written by the body to describe past experiences. Freud popularized descriptions of repressed memories, experiences physically buried in the depths of the subconscious. Modern descriptions are dominated by analogies to computers, in which the human brain is a hard disk that stores experience in electronic files and folders. Typical of biology, the truth is at once more complicated and more beautiful than any of these descriptions.
Fundamentally, memory represents a change in who we are. Our habits, our ideologies, our hopes and fears are all influenced by what we remember of our past. At the most basic level, we remember because the connections between our brains' neurons change; each experience primes the brain for the next experience, so that the physical stuff we're made of reflects our history like mountains reflect geologic eras. Memory also represents a change in who we are because it is predictive of who we will become. We remember things more easily if we have been exposed to similar things before, so what we remember from the past has a lot to do with what we can learn in the future.
An understanding of memory is an understanding of the role of experience in shaping our lives, a critical tool for effective learning in the classroom and beyond. In this article we will explore how experiences become memories, and we'll examine whether the way that we create and store memories can influence the way that we learn.
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