This blog post is dedicated to the fascination and phenomenon that is memory. Memory has always been something that has baffled my mind, but I took extreme notice and obsessed over it in middle school, but refused to look into it until now. I have always had a bad memory in my opinion, but I would always compare my memory to one of my closest friends in middle school. Since learning about memory in class, I have come to see that my memory when I was younger was most relatable to the topic of maintenance rehearsal. This means that I had to repeatedly read, see, or even hear about something multiple times in order to keep it in my working memory. There have been numerous times where I had read a short excerpt in a class in which I would have to explain what I had just read. No matter how short the excerpt was, I was not able to retain a single piece of information from the text in order to give just a quick synopsis of what was just placed in front of me. This caused me to reread the information three, four, maybe even five more times just so I could recall the information to someone else. With this being said, most of this information would go straight to my short-term memory, but the truth is our short-term only last about 20 seconds. So, by the time I would be finished reading something, I would have already forgot about it, ultimately relaying myself back to reading it once more. This idea of rehearsal increases our short-term memory by at least 30 more seconds giving myself enough time to recall, but short after that, most of the information is gone. However, during this process, very little information is retained in my long-term memory, which is one side-effect of maintenance rehearsal.
This was very frustrating, especially when one of your best friends had what appeared to be a photographic memory. His mind had the ability to read or see something once and later, he could recall everything he observed days after, or even weeks at times. This was something I could not even fathom, especially with my struggling memorization issues. When I finally talked to him about it, I learned that he did not have a photographic memory and in fact, a photographic memory does not exist in a sense. What he was doing was something we discussed in class called elaborative rehearsal. Clearly being in middle school he did not use this term, but what he described to me was exactly this. Instead of repeating himself, he would think about what was just taught to him and associated the new information he was trying to learn with information he already knew. With this technique, everything he learned was being easily transferred from his short-term memory to his long-term memory in such a meaningful way that lead him to have such a strong long-term memory. This type of semantic encoding shows how he was able to remember things for so long as this process required the brain to process the information in a more in-depth way than normally. From that point on, I stopped repeating things to myself and practiced this technique of memorization, in which it has helped me immensely.