Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina

Author:John Medina [Medina, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Juvenile Nonfiction, Psychology, Success, Cognitive Psychology, Science, Medical, Life Sciences, General, Learning Styles, Leadership, Self-Help, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Personal Growth, Education, Study Aids, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780979777783
Google: G_GbZ6rDUrsC
Amazon: 0979777747
Barnesnoble: 0979777747
Goodreads: 2251306
Publisher: Pear Press
Published: 2008-02-26T03:00:00+00:00

forgetting

Solomon Shereshevskii, a Russian journalist born in 1886, seemed to have a virtually unlimited memory capacity, both for storage and for retrieval. Scientists would give him a list of things to memorize, usually combinations of numbers and letters, and then test his recall. As long as he was allowed 3 or 4 seconds to “visualize” (his words) each item, he could repeat the lists back perfectly, even if the lists had more than 70 elements. He could also repeat the list backward.

In one experiment, a researcher exposed Shereshevskii to a complex formula of letters and numbers containing about 30 items. After a single retrieval test (which Shereshevskii accomplished flawlessly), the researcher put the list in a box, and waited 15 years. The scientist then took out the list, found Shereshevskii, and asked him to repeat the formula. Without hesitation, he reproduced the list on the spot, again without error. Shereshevskii’s memory of everything he encountered was so clear, so detailed, so unending, he lost the ability to organize it into meaningful patterns. Like living in a permanent snowstorm, he saw much of his life as blinding flakes of unrelated sensory information, He couldn’t see the “big picture,” meaning he couldn’t focus on commonalities between related experiences and discover larger, repeating patterns. Poems, carrying their typical heavy load of metaphor and simile, were incomprehensible to him. In fact, he probably could not make sense of the sentence you just read. Shereshevskii couldn’t forget, and it affected the way he functioned.

The last step in declarative processing is forgetting. The reason forgetting plays a vital role in our ability to function is deceptively simple. Forgetting allows us to prioritize events. Those events that are irrelevant to our survival will take up wasteful cognitive space if we assign them the same priority as events critical to our survival. So we don’t. We insult them by making them less stable. We forget them.

There appear to be many types of forgetting, categories cleverly enumerated by Dan Schacter, the father of research on the phenomenon, in his book The Seven Sins of Memory. Tip-of-the-tongue issues, absent-mindedness, blocking habits, misattribution, biases, suggestibility—the list reads like a cognitive Chamber of Horrors for students and business professionals alike. Regardless of the type of forgetting, they all have one thing in common. They allow us to drop pieces of information in favor of others. In so doing, forgetting helped us to conquer the Earth.

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