According to Goldstein (2011) attention is our ability to focus and concentrate on distinct subject matter. In psychology there are multiple theories and studies done to try to determine our capacity for attention. I will examine two aspects of attention, selective attention or our “ability to focus on one message and ignore all others,” (Goldstein, 2011) and divided attention “paying attention to more than one thing at a time.” These theories are exemplified by Broadbent’s filter model of attention, Treisman’s attenuation model of attention and Nilli Lavie’s concepts of processing capacity and perceptual load.

In Broadbent’s filter model of attention information enters our mind, is held in sensory memory for a fraction of a second, is filtered based on its physical characteristics (tone of voice, pitch, speed of talking, and accent), and then essentially processed. The information is deciphered early and only the filtered message gets further attention. The Broadbent model shows that we can pay attention to one activity while filtering out everything else around us. An example of which would be attending a crowded party and carrying on a conversation while disregarding, or filtering out, the background noise around us, also referred to as selective attention. Another would be driving down the road and being so focused on driving that you missed your exit along with the large sign marking the exit.

In the Treisman model messages are split into two streams based on the message’s physical characteristics, language and meaning by a process known as the attenuator. The primary, attended, message gets most of the further processing attention while a portion of the unattended messages also get some processing, rather than just being filtered out as in the Broadbent model. An example of this would be while at the same party as previously mentioned, and carrying on a conversation, someone says your name and you immediately focus on where your name came from. Although we have the capacity to focus on one activity while filtering out others as in the Broadbent model, we can also process background, or unattended, messages depending on how pertinent they are to the listener as in the Treisman model.

The Nilli Lavie’s theory suggests that we can pay attention to more than one thing at a time, however, we have a limited capacity to process information based on the division of processing resources into processing capacity (how much information we can process) and perceptual load (how easy information is to process). Essentially, we can process more information depending on how easy the information is to process. For an example watching a ball game is a relatively easy task to process whereas a meeting at work will have a higher perceptual load. If you were to engage in a conversation while watching the ball game, you would be adding to the processing capacity however your processing capacity would not be overwhelmed. If you were to engage in the same conversation while in a meeting at work, you would be adding more processing to an already high processing capacity and although the new information is easy to process you will become overwhelmed with too much information and thus not be able to process all the information.

The Broadbent’s filter model of attention and Treisman’s attenuation model of attention shows us how to some degree we can focus on one message while ignoring everything else. Nilli Lavie’s concepts of processing capacity and perceptual load show us that we have a limited capacity for information processing and divided attention can result in our inability to process all the information. We all have been involved in a conversation or a task that was interrupted by another person or event that had the potential to cause us to lose focus on the task at hand. We either ignored the interruption through selective attention or tried to divide our mental faculties among the current objective and the new occurrence with divided attention depending on our capacity for attention.

References

Goldstein, E. B. (2011). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience (4th ed.). Wadsworth, Inc.

Memory is defined as the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present(Goldstein pg. 120). Past events that we experience can play into how we respond to future or present events and happenings. Short term memory is defined as staying with us for brief periods for about 10 to 15 seconds. These memories are not repeated in our mind over and over again so therefore they are short term memories. Long term memory our memories that we store over the course of a lifetime or longer than brief short term memories are stored. We also experienced some thing called procedural memories which are actions like remembering how to ride a bike or how to drive a car. Semantic memory is another form of long-term memory which involves the recognition of names or addresses and being able to identify different people, places, or things because it has been stored for the long term in our memory (Goldstein pg. 120).

In 1968 Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin introduced a flow chart called the modal model of memory which demonstrated three different types of memory. First there was sensory memory which which is the first stage of memory and essentially only holds information for a few seconds or fractions of seconds. This information is about sensory happenings around the individual. The second type of memory is short term which holds seven to ten items for 15-20 seconds. The third and final proposed type of memory is long term. This is the remembering of large amounts of information for years or even decades (Goldstein pg. 121).

Since short term memory is so fleeting, it is easy to assume it is less important than other types of memory. However this couldn’t be further from the truth. Short term memory is responsible for everything we are aware of and know about during a present moment. A great misconception about short term memory is that it can last for a long period of time, however as mentioned earlier it is determined that it only lasts for 15-20 seconds or even less (Goldstein pg. 127). Many studies have been conducted to understand how much can be recalled from short term memory and the duration in which it lasts. Lloyd Peterson and Margaret Peterson conducted a study using letters and counting backwards. The participants were given a set of letters and then were instructed to count backwards from a certain number and after being told to stop they were asked to recall the letters. The findings of this study were that participants recalled about 80% of the three letter groups if they had only been counting for 3 seconds. The number dropped to the participants only remembering about 12% of the three letter groups after counting for 18 seconds (Goldstein pg. 128).

In a book by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee titled “Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life” she discusses how she suffered a devastating stroke at the age of 33 which left her without short term memory and also the loss of the ability to access meaning or connection between types of long term memory. In her book she discusses how this stroke has impacted even the smallest aspects of her life down to when she cooks dinner. She details how making a simple dish like pasta has become a difficult task as she struggles to remember what she is doing and why she was doing it. She writes about how she had to keep note of everything she did in a notebook down to who she spoke to that day, what was discussed, things she did, and so on. Over the years her brain became to form connections again and she regained the ability to remember things from one minute to the next.

This story is an excellent example of how often we use short term memory and may not even realize it. In the book Lee discusses how when cooking she would begin chopping onions and by the time she finished she was unable to remember why she had been chopping them. I’ve also witnessed it firsthand when my brother had a seizure and was unable to remember it even happening shortly after. The EMT’s asked him basic questions about how he had been feeling and even his age and he struggled to remember anything. It can be an incredibly frustrating experience to be unable to remember something that just happened. We use our short term memory every day constantly, and it helps us stay on track and go about our day with purpose. The loss of it can lead to many difficulties and frustrations we can it even begin to imagine until we have lost it.

References

Goldstein, E. B. (2015). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience 4th ; student ed.). Cengage Learning.

Loria, Kevin. “A New Book Tells the Story of What It’s like to Lose Your Short-Term Memory at the Age of 33.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 16 Feb. 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/anterograde-amnesia-christine-hyung-oak-lee-memoir-2017-2.

A man, Scott Bolzan, lost his memory by accident and he has no memory of his past, including his memory with his wife, daughter, and family. He said he has no emotional connection with the pictures they took before. According to himself, “The best word I can use to describe it is just being lost. Because I lost who I am (Patria, 2010).” We always recall the memory about either from our childhood memory or last week. Memory is closely connected with our personal life, although it is not an obvious thing before you try to memorize something. Whenever we try to go back to our past, we need to go through a process called memory retrieval. Amnesia is a brain disease that cannot retrieve memory from the past, which means it makes us fail to go through the process. However, the types of amnesia and the corresponding reasons can be various as well, and the reason for Bolzan’s Amnesia is also important to be discussed.
The memory process is essential before understanding the types. Talking about the memory process, we need to understand the concept of short-term memory and long-term memory. The short-term memory only lasts for a few seconds and the long-term memory can last for a long time. We need to practice the thing we want to remember to make it become a long-term memory. There is a model called the modal model well explained the concept. Lots of people have acknowledged amnesia before, which is also a popular topic in tv dramas. This does not only appear in television shows but also everyday life. There are 2 major types of amnesia, which are retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia. For Bolzan, he fails to recall the memory, which is a retrograde amnesia appearance. It describes the patients who cannot recall the memory from the past. The anterograde amnesia is kind of the opposite, which is not able to tun short-term memory to long-term memory. Different amnesia has different reasons. Injure with the brain, medication, alcohol, cancer, or stroke, and so on can be a reason for memory loss. Scott Bolzan had a slip in the men’s restroom, he had a head injure afterward. According to the interview, he says the reason that he received from the doctor is there is no blood running through his temporal lobe, which is a place for having long-term memory, and that accidentally causes the loss of his memory. Through the feeling of sadness, anger, and so on, Bolzan finally accepted the result.
Memory is always needed practices to become a long-term memory, the one we can recall at any time and anywhere.

Reference:

Patria, B. W. A. M. (2010, April 20). Man With Amnesia Lost 46 Years in Workplace Slip. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/amnesia-man-hits-head-loses-memories/story?id=10396719

Amnesia: Types, Tests, Diagnosis, Symptoms & Causes. (n.d.). Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21455-amnesia

Brown, B. (2021, July 28). The Most Common Causes Of Memory Loss. Forbes Health. https://www.forbes.com/health/healthy-aging/memory-loss-causes/

Have you ever listened to a song and been transported back into a certain time in your life? For me, every time I hear the song “Follow Me” by Uncle Kracker, I am transported back into my high school psychology classroom junior year. This song was incorporated in the lesson on classical conditioning. My teacher played the song over and over and slammed a textbook on the ground at the same spot in the song every time to demonstrate how he could condition us to flinch whenever we heard the song. Four or five years have passed since then, but I still remember the circumstances of this particular lesson. I remember I was sitting on the right side of the classroom, next to my friend Emily. I can still visualize my teacher walking around the classroom as the song was playing and can see him slamming the textbook down on the floor. I can remember exactly when I learned about classical conditioning and can remember the circumstances surrounding it.

This is an episodic memory for me because I can remember the event and the exact time that I encoded the memory of learning about classical conditioning. Typically over time, memories become semantic because we remember the facts and the knowledge but we no longer remember the exact time we learned the information. This does not occur for me because every time I hear the song or am reminded of classical conditioning, I participate in mental time travel; I go back to my high school psychology classroom on the day that I learned about classical conditioning.

In addition, this represents a topic that we discussed regarding recall of long-term memories. The song serves as a retrieval cue for the episodic memory of learning about classical conditioning. Long-term memories need a retrieval cue to be accessed and recalled. These cues can be anything that relates to the memory. In this case, it’s the song because every single time I hear it, I am immediately reminded of classical conditioning because it is brought back into my working memory.

In conclusion, the song, “Follow Me” by Uncle Kracker, relates to a couple of concepts recently discussed in class. First, it is an example of an episodic memory for me because it is a memory of an experience. While many memories eventually become semantic over time, meaning we remember the facts and no longer the circumstances, this memory has remained episodic for me because I still partake in mental time travel. This means that every time I hear the song, I am transported back into the exact moment in my junior year psychology classroom that I learned about classical conditioning. The song also serves as a retrieval cue for the long-term memory because it reminds me of classical conditioning and brings it back into working memory for me to recall it.

I noticed my writing gets better with age.  Not my age, but that of my memories.  When I pen an incident shortly after it happens, I am left with too many details of rhetoric and no clear point.  However, after days or even years I can type it out with more clarity, decorated with the most salient particulars.  One would think reporting an event shortly after occurrence is the best way to go, the specifics still fresh.  But that is what make it worse:  The abundant facts cloud the meaning, and not until the encounter is mulled over does its most significant parts shine through.  It is by this design that our minds streamline the complexity of our experiences to consolidate them into teaching moments.  From an evolutionary perspective, this purging of inscriptional clutter aids survival by helping us decide (Goldstein, 2015, pp. 193, 185).

Over time, long term memories (LTM) are remembered semantically as the jist of what we absorbed, more so than episodically when we are taken back in mental time (Goldstein, 2015, pp. 158, 162).  Semantics have to do with meaning or facts and are often recalled independently of origin.  Sensory nuances recorded as we perceive new realities comprises the episodic memory from which later springs a refined semantic meaning of those sensates, in order to retain the relevant, including critical emotion, for use in conceptual form (Goldstein, 2015, pp. 166, 199).

Often referred to as “groove” formation in the brain during learning (Nichols, n.d.), long-term potentiation strengthens memory storage through the synaptic consolidation of increased firing rate, neurotransmitter transmission and formation of new proteins at the neuronal synaptic level, with systems consolidation eventually adjusting the overall shape of our neural network to accommodate (Goldstein, 2015, pp. 192-194).  The brain thus grows larger, its folds increased, as we learn new material (Nordqvist, 2004), and we become smarter in the miracle of limitless LTM.  The hippocampus located in the temporal lobe is key to pruning the LTMs it functions to form, artistically shown as an ice cream cone of connectivity between itself and parts of the cortex which memorizes such perceptions as color, form, placement, emotion, and thought, with the cone subsequently fading and leaving intact the ice cream of its bonds made between these participating cortical zones.  Some evidence has shown the hippocampus active during memory retrieval as well, but only the episodic (Goldstein, 2015, p. 196).

It is important to note is that retrieval is as essential as storage when it comes to memory – a supply useless without access.  Retrieval is best achieved via cued recall by matching context, state of emotion, task method or conditions met during storage, to efforts when trying to recall (Goldstein, 2015, p. 188).  No wonder I can write a paper after initial cluelessness, by jotting down cue ideas.  At times though, cues can bring forth more past recollections than we bargained for; a forgotten someone invoked by signature cologne, a vacation summoned by a song.  Perhaps this means that everything we ever experienced is stored between our ears, waiting for its prompt to come forward, an idea of interest to many.

Regardless, we remember what is most noteworthy through consolidation and retrieval – similar to the filtering of selective attention, while new episodic and then semantic enlightenment is translucently layered upon the old to enhance and associate before reconsolidation into new retentions (Goldstein, 2015, pp. 88, 199).  The quartz of our memory grows more facets as it becomes an increasing definitive summation of who we are and where we are headed, helping us to write better essays.

References:

_______________________

Goldstein, E. B.  (2015).  Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience  4th ; student ed.).  Cengage Learning.

Nichols, B. K.  (n.d.).  Create new habits: Cut a new groove.  Bryan Nichols and Associates Psychological Services, Inc.  https://drnicholsandassociates.com/articles/new-groove/

Nordqvist, C.  (February 1, 2004).  Juggling makes your brain bigger.  Medical News Today.  https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/5615#Use-it-or-Lose-it

Retrograde amnesia affected me deeply since an evening in December of twenty-fourteen. I had multiple issues as time has passed with remembering what happened within the minutes before the incident, and even the night following it. “Retrograde Amnesia is the loss of memory for something that happy prior to an injury or traumatic event such as a concussion”, (Goldstein, 2015). The loss of memory due to my car accident is a direct result of retrograde amnesia.

Roughly a year after moving to Texas, I was exposed to an extremely traumatic incident. Directly after the accident occurred, I was in such shock and my adrenaline was through the roof, so I was able to still recall some of what happened, but my thoughts were already blurry. I was riding my bicycle down the greenbelt trails (like a sidewalk), and I had come up to a median where there was car traffic coming through. To this day the only thing I am fully certain of was that the driver did not have his turn signal on and was on his telephone. Unfortunately, I did get hit hard and skidded a bit. I hadn’t had a helmet on which was ill played on my part, but I did sprain my ankle and got cut up bad. As time has gone on, instead of my memory of the incident getting clearer and more pronounced, it appears to get foggier and so the days surrounding it. The trauma of the incident has resulted in severe memory loss from that week, but I am hoping it is possible for me to regain it at some point.

Retrograde amnesia was directly caused by the trauma of the event where I was hit by a car. Although this has affected me deeply, there is still possibility that I could remember the details of that time at some point. Trauma effects the brains in mysterious ways and it more than likely always will. There are many different types of amnesia and different causes, but I know this one fits my situation the best. My hope is that in the future we can figure out a way to trigger the details and memories people have lost.

References:
Goldstein, E. Bruce. “Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience”. Cengage Learning, 4th Ed, 2015.

I think that the term “I’m triggered” has gained a lot of popularity the past couple of years. It’s become a replacement for things like “I’m ticked off” or any sort of uncomfortable reaction a person is having. Trigger warnings are placed before social media posts. I wonder if people actually know what it means to be triggered, that is, an implicit memory is being actively relived.

Our long-term memory (LTM) system stores memory in two keys ways: explicit, and implicit. Explicit includes semantic and episodic memory (Wede, 2020). These two memories are conscious in the sense of they are what we think of when we think of a memory. An image or narrative comes to our mind of the first time we rode a bike or facts about what a bike is. Implicit memory, on the other hand, is unconscious memory. We aren’t aware of a specific picture memory when we are experiencing it, our bodies just remember. Procedural memory is our way of remembering how to ride a bike, basically muscle memory.

We procedurally learn what certain actions mean early on in life. The first few years of life are primarily implicit memory, that is unconscious (Van der Kolk, 2014). We develop our attachment systems and learn what mom’s facial expression means to us and how to respond to it. We learn after a series of trial and error whether we are going to be screamed at for spilling juice or whether we will be gently guided towards helping clean up. Even our parent’s tone of voice is encoded in long term memory – and if their voice was paired alongside a scary consequence then we will implicitly remember it all the more. Our amygdala, our brains alarm system, recorded this instance so that we would know in the future every time we heard this tone of voice it meant something scary was about to happen (Van der Kolk, 2014). This is our body’s way of trying to protect itself, our long-term memory recognizes this tone of voice very well. When we are an adult and hear a stranger yelling at their kid in Walmart we start to feel “triggered”. A powerful implicit memory was triggered.

So yes, many people are having physiological responses to everyday stimuli, because it implicitly reminds them of painful experiences from their own narrative. This is what is occurring when someone says they are triggered. However, not every uncomfortable situation is triggering. This is important because sometimes people might use the reference that they are triggered because a subject or experience is merely uncomfortable or vulnerable.

It’s important to know that implicit memory is just that – memory. The threatening instances that our mind has remembered are often times passed yet we feel as though they are happening currently. The reality is that we are often not in danger, but our brains would very much have us believe otherwise. So being triggered doesn’t mean that we are actually in a state of threat, it more means we are in a state of discomfort. This is important because often being triggered means we are attempting to escape or avoid an experience. When we understand the difference, then we are finally able to acknowledge we have been triggered, but we can notice these feelings without responding in a way that is beyond our control

References

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Wede, Josh. (2020) Cognitive Psychology: Modules: Long Term Memory. Retrieved from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules

I don’t know if you have such feelings. With the growth of parents’ age, they often say the last sentence, forget the next sentence, forget someone’s name or something, and even turn around and forget when the front foot just happened. Even myself, there are often “fragments” and “amnesia”, such as holding a mobile phone to find a mobile phone, suddenly forgetting what to do after answering the phone, and often saying “old… Old” from the black. Then, will memory really decline with age? Why are you forgetful when you are young? You may also have such experience. You stay up late and resolutely don’t sleep until 12 o’clock; I have to work overtime all night. I have to play my mobile phone for a while before going to bed. I feel sorry if I don’t play my mobile phone. As everyone knows, these behaviors are actually damaging our memory. Because our sympathetic nerves rest at night and stay excited during the day. Only in this way can we keep energetic all day. When you work and rest irregularly, it is difficult for the sympathetic nerve to remain excited during the day, but it may be excited at night. At this time, inattention and memory decline are also inevitable. Of course, this is our daily talking, memory and other cognitive systems make complaints about age damage. A large part of the reason is that it has a great relationship with their metabolic level and cell activity. One of the key factors is the level of calcium in specific cells in the brain.
As we all know, as we grow older, our memory begins to decline and it becomes more and more difficult to learn new things. Normal aging is known to be associated with the loss of cognitive function. Brain regions responsible for learning and memory, including prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, are particularly vulnerable. The anatomical changes associated with age-related cognitive decline are much more subtle than age-related neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, with extensive cell death and characteristic neuropathological changes.
In the past, it was not unreasonable to think that these were caused by the gradual death of brain cells, but I’m afraid that’s not the case. What causes age-related cognitive impairment? Actually, it has something to do with synapses.Synapse is an electrochemical connection between neurons. It uses neurotransmitter molecules to create functional networks in the central nervous system. In this study, the team of Professor Nicholas a. Hartell, Department of neuroscience, psychology and behavior, University of Leicester, studied whether calcium levels in the hippocampus play a role. Most studies in this field focus on postsynaptic cells, that is, cells receiving neurotransmitters, because it is very difficult to measure the calcium level of presynaptic cells. The research team met this challenge by developing a special mouse variety. The mouse expressed a calcium sensitive fluorescent protein in the presynaptic part of the hippocampus. This study used maze and object recognition test to study the cognitive function of rats at 6, 12, 18 and 24 months, and found a significant correlation between cognitive ability and presynaptic calcium level. In the aged mice with poor performance in the experiment, the steady-state process of keeping intracellular calcium within a certain range began to shake, and calcium accumulation was formed in the presynaptic cells of the hippocampus. In the experiment, increasing the level of intracellular presynaptic calcium in the brain of young mice changed the synaptic characteristics and made their behavior similar to that of old mice. The most fascinating of all the results is that the opposite is true: reducing calcium in mouse brain cells can revitalize their synapses, which obviously has great potential significance for human age-related health problems.

Reference

Lima-Silva, T. B., & Yassuda, M. S. (2009). The relationship between memory complaints and age in normal aging. Dementia & neuropsychologia. Retrieved October 17, 2021, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5619225/.

Pereda, D., Al-Osta, I., Okorocha, A. E., Easton, A., & Hartell, N. A. (2019, July 16). Changes in presynaptic calcium signalling accompany age‐related deficits in hippocampal LTP and cognitive impairment. Wiley Online Library. Retrieved October 17, 2021, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acel.13008.

Have you ever wondered why you can remember your childhood phone number but forget half of the list of groceries you knew you’d remember without writing down? The answer has to do with the ways memory works. Memory isn’t one process but a complicated myriad of functions that work together to process, store, and retrieve information. Memories from childhood, like the phone number, are stored in long-term memory, or LTM. The long-term memory is exactly as it sounds – for long-term storage of information. It is like a vault, holding all sorts of information until something triggers its retrieval or recall. The forgotten part of the grocery list never got stored in long-term memory and stayed in short-term memory, or STM. Short-term memory holds items for a very short time and is useful for exactly what it sounds like, short tasks where you only need to remember something for about 30 seconds or less (Goldstein, 2015). We use our short-term memories frequently in daily life, but if we don’t make an effort to transfer that data into the long-term, it will be forgotten.

For instance, yesterday, I realized we were low on cat food. So, I stored that info in my short-term memory and hopped on the internet to order said cat food. I ordered the cat food and then moved on with my day. The information about needing cat food was in and out of my brain. Some call short-term memory “working memory,” but in reality, STM is a part of working memory. Working memory also sounds like its function because it stores information for a short period of time to use the information for a task or manipulate the stored data (Golstein, 2015). I needed to remember that we were low on cat food, so I could use that information to get online and order more. I used the stored information. The stored data worked for me and helped me decide on ordering more cat food. After I no longer needed the information, I didn’t need it, and I certainly didn’t need to send it to long-term memory. On the other hand, there’s lots of information I do want to remember and have remembered for a very long time, like my childhood phone number and the grocery list.

So, how does information make it from short-term to long-term memory, and what is the process of retrieval? There’s no way I could still remember my childhood phone number if I hadn’t rehearsed it or repeated it until it was cemented in my brain. This type of rehearsal is called maintenance rehearsal. It works great for the short-term but is not super effective for long-term encoding. Encoding is the process by which memories get transferred to long-term memory (Goldstein, 2015). There’s another way to remember information long-term. Let’s say repeating the numbers repeatedly didn’t work very well, and I still couldn’t remember the sequence. Elaborative rehearsal is a way of encoding information that involves creating a more in-depth connection to the data. This can be done in many creative ways. For example, my childhood phone number is 214-373-6791. 214 is a Dallas, TX area code (the first one), so I associated 214 with Dallas. 373 is easy because two of the numbers are the same, but 373 and me rhyme. So, I would say 373 and me. Then, 6791 is a little tricker, but 3+3=6 and 6+3=9. Remember there is a 7 in there and that 1 is at the end, and there you go. Dallas, me, a little math, 7 and 1. I created meaning and used a memory trick to transfer that number to my long-term memory. Now that the phone number is safely stored in long-term memory, what happens when I need it?

Everything in LTM must have a retrieval cue or something that triggers the mind to remember the information. For me, I think about my childhood home, Dallas, and phone number, and the number appears in my head. The cue for me is that emotional connection to the past, which makes the phone number an episodic memory. Episodic memories are personal and tell us about episodes in our lives (Goldstein, 2015). The phone number became more than a grouping of numbers for me, and today it tells a story about my childhood. Retrieval cues can be a part of memory encoding or something we are unaware of, but every memory has some type of stimuli that brings it from long-term storage to our working memory. Now, back to that grocery list.

The grocery list? That’s more complicated than it seems. In 1956, George Miller proposed that there are limits to our short-term memories. His theory stated that we could remember seven items plus or minus two (Goldstein, 2015). After many studies, this idea rings true, if not without some updated additions. You see, we can remember five to nine items, or groups of items, or groups of concepts of items which enlarge our short-term memory capacity. We do this by a process called chunking. Chunking entails grouping related information into pieces that are easy to remember (Goldstein, 2015). If I’m trying to remember my grocery list and wisely categorized the items into nine categories, it’s possible that I could remember nine times nine items. What happens if I just had 13 items on my list and those items weren’t categorized and were hastily written down? If I didn’t make a point to categorize or rehearse, then it makes sense that I cannot remember the whole list. Although I needed that information in my working memory to purchase groceries, I realized that data hadn’t made it into my long-term memory when it came time to retrieve it.

The process of remembering information is not something we often think about outside academic or work environments, but our minds are perceiving, processing, storing, and retrieving information constantly. Whether we are trying to remember an item for a few seconds or remember something for the long term, our brain is directing the action. It’s essential to be aware of the limitations of short-term memory and the variety of techniques our brains can respond to to ensure memory retention in the long term. One key takeaway is that if you want to remember something, creating a meaningful connection and rehearsing that connection can make the difference between remembering and forgetting.

Goldstein, E. B. (2015). Cognitive Psychology Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience. Cengage Learning.

Life events, good or bad, stay with us long after the event has passed. A smell or an old photo can take us back to that moment in time. Something long forgotten can suddenly seem fresh in our minds.

Retrieval is the process of remembering information that has been encoded then stored in the brain. When retrieval occurs, an outside stimulus provides a cue that information is familiar or has been seen previously. Retrieval cues are words or outside stimuli that can trigger a memory.

Some memories we would prefer to forget but they remain with us, nonetheless. For example, most of us had an unpleasant experience that we associate with a food or beverage. Alcohol, especially, is a common trigger for bad memories. Most of us have a particular alcoholic beverage that we have sworn off after drinking way too much and having the worst hangover of our lives. For me, tequila is that beverage. Just a slight hint of tequila is enough to ignite my gag reflex. The scent takes me back to that Halloween party and hangover that followed. I remember the people, the location, and how badly I felt.

I have questioned why we remember such unpleasant memories. Evolution may play a role in why stressful or dangerous memories remain so vivid even year later. Imprinting dangerous situations in our minds may serve as a warning to avoid them in the future (Heshmat, 2015). While a good portion of the population, especially college-age kids, drink to excess any given weekend, perhaps the memory of the night we “almost died” (at least figuratively) after a night of drinking is our bodies’ way of reminding us to take it easy and slow down.

Memories do not have be monumental events such as getting married or the birth of a child to stay relevant in our minds. The seemingly most insignificant memories can serve as a reminder to keep ourselves safe.

References

Heshmat, S. (2015). Why do we remember certain things, but forget others? Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/201510/why-do-we-remember-certain-things-forget-others

Goldstein, E. B. (2011). Cognitive psychology: connecting mind, research, and everyday experience. Cengage Learning.