Memories Are Made of This: How Memory Works in Humans and Animals
Rusiko Bourtchouladze
New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Cornish Library
QP 406 B675 2002
Memory: Retention or recall of learned information (8).
Every instant we are remembering something. But how are memories formed? And why, if remembering is so ordinary, do our memories fail so often? What is happening in the brain when we remember a face, reconstruct an image of a place we have visited, or search for an answer that we think we know? Does memory storage imply the fixing of memories in particular chunks of the brain tissue, or is it a dynamic, biologically creative process which involves many different sites in the brain? How long do different memories last? What do genes have to do with memory? And finally, what do the memories of different species have in common? (13).
Hermann Ebbinghaus' 'Curve of Forgetting:'
The letter T in the Curve of Forgetting represents training, or the introduction of information to a subject. The Curve charts the retention of this information up until about one month after introduction.
Most memory loss occurs within a short time after training; once the memory has survived that barrier it is much more stable (9).
Repetition gives longer-lasting memories (9).
Spaced training - repeated training sessions with a rest period in between each one - produce longer-lasting memories than do massed training (9).
In describing those who have experienced amnesia as a result of serious head trauma, Bourtchouladze writes, It may sound strange, but the recovery of memory depends not so much on the relative importance of the events forgotten as on the time before the injury that the events occurred. Although memories often return in an irregular, hit-or-miss order, the older memories typically come back first (24).
All memories start as episodic, but only unique experiences survive as time goes by. Those that do not have freshness and characteristic flavour tend to go downhill with time. ... Sameness leads to forgetfulness, as seen through the eyes of the writer John McPhee in the novel Silk Parachute: "When your mother is ninety-nine years old, you have so many memories of her that they tend to overlap, intermingle, and blur. It is extremely difficult to single out one or two, impossible to remember any that exemplify the whole" (28).
Much of what we retrieve from memory may be hidden from our conscious awareness. The central question is therefore: are we always aware that we are remembering? (36).
Here [H.M.] is, as seen through the eyes of Milner and colleagues, fourteen years after the operation:
H.M.'s severe anterograde amnesia persists... During three of the nights at the Clinical Research Center, the patient rang for the night nurse, asking, with many apologies, if she would tell him where he was and how he came to be there. He clearly realized that he was in a hospital but seemed unable to reconstruct any of the events of the previous day. On another occasion he remarked, 'Every day is alone in itself, whatever enjoyment I've had, and whatever sorrow I've had' (46).
