Making Kids Cleverer by David Didau

Author:David Didau [David Didau]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785833854
Publisher: Crown House Publishing
Published: 2018-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

How memory works

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain,

Our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain.

Awake but one, and lo, what myriads rise!

Samuel Rogers, ‘The Pleasures of Memory’

Is memory anything more than a handy metaphor to help us understand where we put information we’re not currently thinking about?

Is there more than one kind of memory?

What can we do to improve our memories?

Is forgetting as bad as we think it is?

Your memory isn’t just a list of facts, it’s a repository of everything you’ve ever experienced. “Everything we see, hear, and think about is critically dependent on and influenced by our long-term memory.”1 When we think about deliberately acquiring facts we conjure up words like ‘memorisation’ and ‘rote learning’, which give us the idea that the process of getting stuff into our heads is a brute force activity that requires sweat and effort. In reality, remembering stuff is easy. Think of all the things you just seem to know: what you look like; your mother’s birthday; whether you prefer your eggs poached or scrambled; what an aubergine is; which side of your car the fuel cap is and so on. No one sits down and deliberately commits these things to memory, but nevertheless, there they are. This chapter is an attempt to explain how we acquire knowledge and how it shapes our ability to think once we’ve learned it.

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