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"Understanding the Brain", The Birth of a Learning Science, 2007, page 120
“Improve Your Memory (1)!”
The Capacity to Forget is Necessary for Good Memorisation
The Capacity to Forget is Necessary for Good Memorisation
Memory is an essential function in learning and is also the subject of rich fantasies and distortions. “Improve your memory!” “Increase your memory capacity!” “How to get an exceptional memory fast!” cry the marketing slogans for books and pharmaceutical products.
The slogans are pushed with increased insistence during examination time. Do we now know enough to understand the processes and to envisage the creation of products and methods that improve memorisation?
Do we need the same forms of memory today as was called for fifty or a hundred years ago in a world of different skills and professions? Can we talk of different memories – for instance, visual, lexical, or emotional? Do learning methods use the memory in the same way they did fifty years ago? These are relevant questions in this context.
In recent years, the understanding of memory has advanced. We now know that the memory does not respond only to the type of phenomenon and it is not located in only one part of the brain. However, contrary to one popular belief, memory is not infinite and this is because information is stored in neuronal networks, the number of which is itself finite (though enormous). No-one can hope to memorise the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Research has also found that the capacity to forget is necessary for good memorisation. On this, the case of a patient followed by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luri is enlightening: the patient had a memory that seemed to be infinite but, with no capacity to forget, was incapable of finding a steady job, unless it was as a “memory champion”.
It seems that the forgetting rate of children is the optimal rate to build up an efficient memory (Anderson, 1990).
The slogans are pushed with increased insistence during examination time. Do we now know enough to understand the processes and to envisage the creation of products and methods that improve memorisation?
Do we need the same forms of memory today as was called for fifty or a hundred years ago in a world of different skills and professions? Can we talk of different memories – for instance, visual, lexical, or emotional? Do learning methods use the memory in the same way they did fifty years ago? These are relevant questions in this context.
In recent years, the understanding of memory has advanced. We now know that the memory does not respond only to the type of phenomenon and it is not located in only one part of the brain. However, contrary to one popular belief, memory is not infinite and this is because information is stored in neuronal networks, the number of which is itself finite (though enormous). No-one can hope to memorise the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Research has also found that the capacity to forget is necessary for good memorisation. On this, the case of a patient followed by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luri is enlightening: the patient had a memory that seemed to be infinite but, with no capacity to forget, was incapable of finding a steady job, unless it was as a “memory champion”.
It seems that the forgetting rate of children is the optimal rate to build up an efficient memory (Anderson, 1990).
"Understanding the Brain", The Birth of a Learning Science, 2007, page 120
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