You Can Learn to Remember: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life pdfdrive com

memory and intelligence
It is a common and misguided belief that we fall into two categories of
intelligence – we are either bright or dim. Like many people, I did not excel
at school. What is more I accepted the judgment of my teachers that I
lacked potential – I knew my place and did not try to change it. But the
reality is that I need not have had so little confidence in my abilities.
Measur able intelligence is largely a product of application – if we apply
effective methods of learning in the right way, then we are all as able as
each other to store and re trieve data. Memory training enables us to
strength en our ability to learn – we know that training our memory can
raise our IQ. So, the skills of concentration, imagination and association –
all of which are key memory skills – make us brighter too.
theories of forgetting
H
ow long does memory last? What factors govern forgetting? The so-called
“trace-decay theory” claims that the neural connections that form particular
memories (see
p.42
) may fade and, if they are not used regularly, disappear.
Currently, this is impossible to prove. A more popular view is that, once
something is committed to long-term memory, it is never lost, and only requires
the appropriate association to bring it to mind. Over the course of a lifetime,
however, a number of different memories may come to share many of the same
cues. In this case it will be difficult to select out any one memory in particular,

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unless there are exceptional reasons (additional cues) for doing so. For example,
we can probably remember our first day at school, as well as the worst day. But
most of our school days are too insignificant to have specific cues that
differentiate one day from another. They have not been lost from memory, but
they have been buried in a shapeless cluster within our mind. Nevertheless, in
principle there will be cues, however subtle, that will allow us to recover every
single day if we work at doing so.
According to this theory, memories become hard to find because they “take
over” each other’s cues. Interference is both proactive inhibition (an existing
memory inhibits the new one because the cues are monopolized by the older
memory) and retroactive inhibition (a new memory blocks our ability to recall
old information because the new memory “steals” the older memory’s cues).
Some one memorizing two different lists of city names on consecutive days will
recall either list less accurately than someone with a list of city names and a list
of dog breeds.
Proactive inhibition works partly because it causes us to make
approximations. If we see a breed of dog that we cannot identify but which
resembles a corgi, we will store it as “something that is quite like a corgi but not
one”. If asked to recall the appearance of the dog, our memories will bring to
mind a corgi and we are likely to have forgotten precisely the distinctive features
of the actual breed we need to recall. But retroactive inhibition appears to be the
more persistent mechanism in forgetting, because it seems to cause old
memories to be “unlearned” and is easily suggestible by logic. When we learn
new aspects of a topic, drawing different conclusions from the ones already
learned, the new aspects will cause the older theories to be hard to fathom,
because the memory of their logic is lost.
déjà vu
Déjà vu (“already seen”) is the often disconcerting feeling of re-
experiencing some thing – of treading on ground we seem to have trodden
before. For example, we may be engaged in a conversation and feel that we
have had exactly the same interaction on a previous occasion. One theory
about déjà vu is that when the features of a current experience are similar to
a previous one, the details of which seem fogotten, the mind fills in the
blanks, creating a real but misleading memory from a few fragments.
Another explanation is that an event may be transferred by the unconscious

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straight into long-term memory and then reactivated from there. Of course,
we may simply have forgotten a previous experience, making our apparent
recognition of the current event baffling.