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Role Of Memory On Decision Making

Decent Essays

Role of memory in decision-making The importance of memory is summarized in a line Quintilian wrote in Book 11.2, “all learning depends on memory, and teaching is in vain if everything we hear slips away”(Quintilian 59). The so-called memory tends to be playing an enormous role in shaping and structuring the thoughts, but what is memory explicitly? The Oxford Dictionary defines memory as the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information. Hence, memory is the reservoir of past information, which when later recalled allows one to reconstruct the realities of the past. The role memory plays are numerous, but how exactly does it assist in decision-making? Indeed, while making decisions one automatically recollects the series of …show more content…

In both scenarios, one recollects the past for similar experience/s which one can relate this event to. Hence, after searching and comparing given information to the information that is stored in one’s memory, one then tells what the given information is; in above case the man likely to be a Jew. Thus, one’s decisions are based on knowledge one has in the memory. Similarly, in Cicero’s book, De Oratore, he tells a story about a poet named Simonides, who was believed to be the inventor of the art of mnemonics. At one event, he was dining at a rich man’s house where he recited one of his poems composed in honor of his host. The host refused to pay the amount promised, but was only willing to pay half the initial price. It is said that a little later Simonides received a message that two young men on horseback are waiting for him to which he left the dinning room immediately. As he went out, there were no young men to find but to his disbelief, he figured out that in his absence the roof of the house had collapsed on the heads of the remaining people. Consequently, it was impossible for the relatives to figure out who each individual was as the impact had crushed their heads. In this story, Simonides recalled his memory and recollected the order in which each individual was sitting. Thus, it was through him, they were able to distinguish each of the victims. Hence,

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