Incidental Forgetting : The Disitive And Positive Effects Of Memory

Memory is a powerful concept. Often when an individual undergoes a traumatic situation, the ramifications of these actions seep into an individualfs psyche unknowingly. In effect this passes through memory and becomes sub-consciously buried within a personfs behavioural patterns generally. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink explores the concept of a young mans subconscious desire for a woman whom he gcanft remember to forgeth (1Memento) as she is so deeply inlaid within his soul.

Despite the use of humor, the speaker of “Forgetfulness” establishes both a melancholic and deeply reflective tone in order to analyze both the inevitability of forgetfulness and the heartache that comes with it. Employing humor, Collins appeals to his audience and conveys the universal experience of forgetting memories as you grow older, “well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those / who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle” (18-19). The speaker humorously contradicts the old bicycle cliché that states that once you learn how to ride it, you never forget. According to the speaker, however, you do forget. And if you can forget how to ride a bicycle, you can certainly forget everything else. In no time, you will be blindly sinking into oblivion, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. On the surface, the speaker’s musings appear quite humorous. However, Collins’ words reveal an undeniable truth about the human condition -- that growing older and forgetfulness are inevitable. The speaker continues to emphasize this idea by comparing life itself to an individual trying to remember a book they once read:

Anyone reading Joshua Foer’s “The End of Remembering” can assume that he knows a lot about the brain and how it works. After all he graduated from Yale in 2004, and later went on to become the 2006 United States Memory Champion. With Foer’s interest in mental athletes he decided to do a journalism project to study them. This project would end up being the result of his book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything from which “The End of Remembering” is one of the chapters. In this chapter Foer’s lays a solid foundation of the development of writing. He also includes historical views of remembering and how we learned in terms of our memory. Foer not only gives historical views but supports his claims with science

O’Brien describes that memories can affect one’s emotions in a detrimental way over time. Reflecting on memories that one felt affected them negatively can be bad for the mind and cause them emotional turmoil. O’Brien describes a “hard story to tell (O’Brien 172).” “For more than twenty years,” O’Brien, “had to live with...the shame.” O’Brien had been “trying to push (the memory) away,” The event O’Brien reminisces on

Every act of remembering is also, intrinsically, an act of forgetting. Giving preference to particular details of an event lessens the immediacy of others. Thus, memory is its own, unique narrative culled from an almost endless sea of details present, and sometimes not present, in the original event. Memory is the past, reformulated and interpreted through the lens of the present (Huyssen 1995). When an event is commemorated through a physical act of memory, the narrowing of possible details becomes even more finely tuned, limited by the physical scope of possibilities for bodies in a three-dimensional space.

Memories are crucial to everything we do every day. Without memories we would not know who is important to us or what we enjoy doing. We use our memories continuously, even when we do not realize that we are. In her memoir Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan loses much of her episodic memory from the time period in which she battled Anti-NDMA-receptor encephalitis. Because of this, she loses a portion of her identity, and struggles for a period of time while attempting to find herself again.

Teaching About Repressed Memories of Childhood Sexual Abuse - This article describes an undergrad 3 credit hour course taught in the fall at Rollins College. It examines human memory and its role in two applied issues which include repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse and eye witness testimony. The course content includes four components: 1) the instructor introduces students to the subject matter, 2) students review the nature of science, 3) learn about the extensive literature on the nature of human memory, and 4) learn about the anecdotal and scientific literature (for and against) on repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse and the literature on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and identification. Freud and the notion of repression is discussed both in this article and in

The importance of understanding the underlying psychological mechanisms by which both memories are repressed and

Many human development specialists have examined memory loss of adults later in life. During the past fifty years, there have been many studies in children’s cognitive development and earlier childhood memory loss. Ernest G. Schachtel conducted studies on why people forget childhood memories as they grow older. He described the processes that could be involved in early memory loss (Crain, 2005). He was influenced by Sigmund Freud’s cognitive theory (Crain, 2005). Lev S. Vygotsky, however, described children’s early memory development as a holistic process that involved society, physiological, cultural, and economical environments. (Vygotsky,

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us

Short Term Memory Loss. Ironically most of us don’t even think about memory that often, much less Short Term Memory. Because of that, this psychological disorder often tends to get overlooked for a small problem that no one wants to take serious. Most people would recognize this disorder from the popular movie, Finding Nemo. In which one of the main characters suffers from short term memory loss. In the film it’s taken as a lovable flaw, instead of the serious disorder that it is. But Short Term Memory is a lot more than one disorder found in a character in a movie. It is a somber disorder that could happen to any of us. This paper will be going through the gravity of this disorder and the causes to its victims.

False memories have been the subject of many studies since Deese (1959) investigated their effects.

Naturally, life is a continuous cycle of experience and learning. Yet often times so much is buried in our lives that we fail to remember or recall what we have learned. Memories that range from miniscule facts to important emotions can often leave unknowingly from our mind. Billy Collin’s “Forgetfulness” shows how memories are delicate and fragile, and that the process of forgetting is one that is nonchalant. Billy Collins effectively blends subtle humor and irony with a dramatic tone shift to explain that ideas and facts that people think are important flee the mind, showing that nothing good can last. Although he refers to memories in a lighthearted, thoughtful manner, the poem gradually shifts (just

In everyone’s life there is a moment that is so dreadful and horrific that it is best to try to push it further and further back into your mind. When traumatized by death for example it is very natural to shut off the memory in order to self-defense suppresses the awful emotional experience. Very often it is thoughtful that this neglecting and abandoning is the best way to forget. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, memory is depicted as a dangerous and deliberating faculty of human consciousness. In this novel Sethe endures the oppression of self imposed prison of memory by revising the past and death of her daughter Beloved, her mother and Baby Suggs. In Louise Erdrich’s

Memory makes us. It is, to an extent, a collection of unique and personal experiences that we, as individuals, have amassed over our lifetime. It is what connects us to our past and what shapes our present and the future. If we are unable remember the what, when, where, and who of our everyday lives, our level of functioning would be greatly impacted. Memory is defined as or recognized as the “sum or total of what we remember.” Memory provides us the ability to learn and adjust to or from prior experiences. In addition, memory or our ability to remember plays an integral role in the building and sustaining of relationships. Additionally, memory is also a process; it is how we internalize and store our external environment and experiences. It entails the capacity to remember past experiences, and the process of recalling previous experiences, information, impressions, habits and skills to awareness. It is the storage of materials learned and/or retained from our experiences. This fact is demonstrated by the modification, adjustment and/or adaptation of structure or behavior. Furthermore, we as individuals, envision thoughts and ideas of the present through short-term memory, or in our working memory, we warehouse past experiences and learned values in long-term memory, also referred to as episodic or semantic memory. Most importantly, memory is malleable and it is intimately linked to our sense of identity and where we believe we belong in the world.