Have you wondered how ‘less-human’ you will be without your memory? Not much importance is placed on memory but it determines our continuous existence on planet earth. Without memory I doubt if any human being can be regarded as rational being.
If you have watched films or seen someone who loss his memory, you can only imagine how ‘new’ the person is. In their brains, there is no single thing they can relate with. They look so confused and everything you tell them looks very strange and new. If you look at the things we have learnt from infant to adulthood, you will agree with me that it could be very tough to just loss all suddenly.
To properly grasp the idea behind this topic, let’s try and explain the meaning of memory and what it is all about.
Memory is our ability to encode, store, retain and subsequently recall information and past experiences in the human brain. It can be thought of in general terms as the use of past experience to affect or influence current behaviour. Source
Memory begins from the day we become conscious about the reality surrounding us as infants. Memory is memory because the things it remembers are picked by any of our senses. Memory moves from short-term to long-term. If you learn how to make food, for instance, your memory records this process and stores it in short or long-term memory storage. Your consciousness, interests and desires about what you learnt depend on where this process is stored. This is also determined by repetition. The more you repeat this process, the more it stores in your long-term memory. This is why people say practice makes perfect.
Memory, it should be noted is related to learning. Once we learn anything, to retrieve that thing later when we need it, we need our memories to do that for us. It is the storage house of everything we learn consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes we see things and pay no attention to them but having seen these things through our eyes felt them through our senses, the memory record these things and we can get them back in the process of remembering or recollection. The memory rely on learning because it is what we learn consciously or unconsciously that we store and retrieve from our memories whenever we need them.
If memory is important and our continuous existence relies so much on it, how less human can you be without it? Assuming this important memory is taken from you, how human can you be?
Without your memory, you wont recognize your parent, family; you won’t remember all you learnt in school even if you were a professor before the incident. You will become what John Locke called tabula rasa (an empty slate). In this confused state, would you still refer to such person as human being? If such person accidentally kills another man, will you judge the person as morally wrong? Do not forget that morality is for conscious human beings. In this case, is this person amoral (lacking a moral sense) or immoral (Not conforming to accepted standards of morality)?
For me, I think the person is amoral! A being without memories of past things cannot be judged morally. Such person cannot also be called ‘human’ in the right sense of the world. To refer to such person as human is to assume the person still have all the qualities that makes one human. But without memory, a ‘human’ is just like every other thing out there. I cannot imagine human without memories. Assuming we forgot all we learnt, what would become of us? Can we still talk about progress and development when we do not even know what it means to progress or developed.
A human without memory for me stops being a ‘human’ because all the attributes and qualities that makes us human is already lacking.
What is your take on this topic? What kind of human would you be without your memory?
