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A Glorious And Admirable Gift Of Nature Essay

Decent Essays

Which comes first, the chicken, or the egg? Many people today can ask the same kind of question about memory. Which comes first, learning, or memory? John Fahey and Gilberto Santos described memory as, “A glorious and admirable gift of nature by which we recall past things, we embrace present things, and we contemplate future things through their similarity to past things” (Fahey & Santos, 2002). Today memory is divided into two categories, storage, and retrieval. But how exactly do we store memories and retrieve memories? Storing and retrieving memories goes more in depth than one could imagine. Looking back at some of the modern theories about memories, they were broken into three categories; encoding, storage, and retrieval. Michelle Miller described these categories in, Teaching Effectively with Technology. He said, “Encoding, meaning the process of turning information into some kind of lasting memory representations for some period of time; storage, meaning maintaining memory representations for some period of time; and retrieval, meaning accessing stored representations, usually so that they can be used to accomplish a task or serve a goal (Miller, 2014). People mainly focus on storage and retrieval today because those are the two things we have recurring problems with. When we learn a new language and cannot remember how to speak it, we blame our ability to store memories. When we walk into a room and forget what we were looking for, we blame our ability to

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