I forget. If "I forget" is the end of this post, I have lied and deceived you, because the truth is, I also remember. There are things I remember, and there are things I forget. When I was in elementary or primary school or what some of you guys call grade school, I remembered everything. The concept of studying was alien to me and remained alien to me for a long time. There were only homework and assignments. This is not to suggest that I was the smartest person in the room. I was not, and I am not. I cannot speak about the future, or I would add, "I never would be."
These days, I have difficulty remembering things. Five years ago, I could, out of a crowd, pick out a face I saw ten years before and match it with the name, place and the stuff we said. If we had never spoken before, I could remember where I had seen him or her. I am not able to do that anymore. Now I see a face I've seen before and I am convinced that I have seen the person before but placing the place and circumstances through which we met and the name of the person is often a problem.
I would think that there is something wrong with my brain except there are things that happened when I was only between two or three years old which I still recall entirely. This alone leads me to conclude that there is nothing wrong with the ability of my brain to store information. It appears that it is the recall or retrieval system that is faulty. But if the recall or retrieval system is defective, then why is it that I could recall the song that often played on the local radio when I was three? How is it that I remember distinctly how my mom taught me to draw a fish, elephant and apple when I was three years old? How come, I remember learning "S-E-V-E-N" was 7 and how that was more difficult than learning to spell any other number in words. By the way, it was my dad that taught me that one. And I assure you that there was none of those mommy's pampering involved.
To answer these questions, I went back to:
The Brain!
You guessed it.
When we say we remember, what we mean is that we have a memory.
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved.[1]
So, to have memory means not only that we were able to store information but that we are also able to retrieve it voluntarily or involuntarily. Memory is who we are. In my post last month, Artificial Intelligence and Why There Would be No Takeover, I mentioned that it is possible for people to live forever. The idea is, if our memories are one with us and these memories can be transferred to a machine, the machine could be us even after our bodies becomes tired and dies. This is a digression. The point is, the smell of your grandma's porridge yam (in my case) and maybe the smell of your grandma's chocolate cookies (whatever floats your boat), your first kiss, memories of the girl you swore you'd never leave, the memories of the place you grew up, the bedtime stories your mom told you repeatedly, familiar faces and experiences, tie your past to your present and affects the way you would see future events. These memories are you. They are me.
As was discussed in the post, Learning By Making Connections, memory is not some small cabinets in the brain arranged in some order that helps you retrieve information when you want. The memory is not a thing.
When a person tries to do something they have not done before like ride a bike, drive a car, go to a location they haven't been before, or even learn a new language, it is usually tricky at first because the brain's resources have to be used to coordinate the different aspects of the activity. But as this process continues, the neurons make a connection with each other by passing electrical synapses back and forth between the neurons. This process continues until the neurons establish a linear neural pathway. So learning is not really about taking in new information and saving it in the brain. It is more like taking new information and connecting it to an already existing one. Once this connection is made through repetition, the individual becomes more comfortable with this activity.
So information is saved to memory when the neurons of the brain establish a connection. Excellent. But, how come some of this information is ingrained in our being and forever become a part of us while we forget others? This reminds of what happened the other day at the shopping mall. My cousin and I were standing in front of display refrigerators, trying to decide which beverages to buy. He is very conscious of his sugar intake, so it took us some time. Meanwhile, there was a girl across the shop that maintained perfect eye contact with him. He pointed her out to me before approaching her. Well, it turned out that she was promoting freshly squeezed fruit juice for the shop. She pointed out her products and advised us to buy, but my cousin was interested in her way beyond juice. If you've started wondering where this story is going, then I better finish it up. He asked her for her phone number. It turned out that the mall did not allow their staff to give out their numbers to customers. Whatever! My cousin told her that nobody else would know what they discuss since he would memorise the digits if she said them! Sure, he had the numbers memorised until we walked out of the mall, but he forgot her name!
Captured in this story is something that happens with information saved in the brain. We can recall some of them while others are more difficult to recall. Some would even seem to be lost. Interestingly, what we do recall never come from the same place in the brain: the information that makes up a single thing like say, a phone number, comes from different parts of the brain and different connections made from previous experience. For instance, the number of the girl whose name was forgotten could be 706-218-1950.
As a single set of numbers, it would be difficult for my cousin to recall but if he knows another person whose number began with 706, he would have three fewer digits to worry about. Them the last three is 1950, ten years before Nigeria's independence from Great Britain and yes, there are three numbers in between, oh it is 218. So he can afford to walk away from the girl knowing that all he has to remember are the person whose number started like hers, the independence connection and the three middle number! Smart m&#su#er.
Scientists have not been able to reconstruct exactly how the brain pieces the different parts together or which parts of the brain are responsible for which part but the research is ongoing. I bet that you too remember the girl's phone number, but what's her name?
Why Do We Remember Some and Forget Some?
When you have an experience, say your first kiss, you perceive the event with several of your senses: your eyes, your mouth, your skin, and your ear may hear the sound of a bird or the sound of his or her voice. That's a bunch of stimuli but no problem. They are all fired at your brain from the different sensory organs. It is the part of the brain called Hippocampus and the Frontal Cortex which receive this information.
The job of these parts is to decide if the information is so valuable that they need to be filed away as Long term or Short-term memory. When it makes the decision, the data is saved in the appropriate part of the brain in bits and pieces until it needs to be retrieved. This storage as described here, is done when chemicals (called neurotransmitters) bridge the gap between two dendrites, connecting them.
Researchers like Shawn Achor are also finding that the brain, when happy, functions much better than when we are sad. The state of mind we were in when we received a stimulus would determine whether that memory would be a long-term memory. No wonder we usually remember our first love, first kiss, lyrics of songs we like. But why are some of these connections so short-lived?
It turns out that there are three types of memory according to the Multi-Store Model:
- Sensory memory;
- Short-term memory and;
- Long-term memory.
**Sensory memory is that type of memory that lingers a moment after you have felt stimuli like the feeling of being touched that remains for a moment after the touch. It does not last long enough to be short-term memory. Short-Term memory is that memory that enables you to remember information that would be used within a short time. Both the amount of data and the space of time within which it can be recalled are limited. More than seven items may not be held in short-term memory for more than thirty seconds.
However, there are methods of pushing short-term memory items into long-term memory. These techniques include repetition which resets the expiration clock of the short-term memory over and over again to extend its life. However, this is not a permanent solution because the memory is forgotten as soon as the repetition is stopped unless repetition was done long enough or something else is done to put the memory in the long term. Linking a short-term memory to familiar experiences such as my cousin did is also useful in informing the hippocampus and frontal cortex that the information is a high priority and should be treated as such.
Long-term memory can store unlimited amounts of information indefinitely but the signal to treat the information as necessary has to be given to the brain through repetition or connection to things already known. In my cousin's case, he placed less value in the girl's name. Therefore he forgot. If he had repeated it as many times as he repeated her phone number, surely he would have remembered. Again, if she had the same name as his grandmother, this would be enough for the information to stored long term. :) Next, we shall look at what is responsible for when we are unable to retrieve information that was stored in long-term memory or what is called forgetting. Then, finally, we shall consider how forgetting may be a good thing.
Forgetting
Most people live their lives in the form of sleep. They do things without paying attention. This happens to most of us. If you have ever gotten into your car and driven from home to office without paying attention to the scenery you pass on your way to work, the people you pass, whats showing on that electronic billboard, the weather and so on, then you are guilty of this. You let your life go on as a continuous collage of events without paying any particular attention to things.
Attention is the operative word. For humans to retrieve information stored in their brain, they have to:
- encode the information correctly (that is, ensure it is stored in the first place)
- ensure that the information is retained (that is, ensure that it is stored as a long-term memory through the processes highlighted above)
- retrieve it.
If you are unable to retrieve the information in spite of having done the first two things correctly, then it is the retrieval process that is suspect. This could be due to a disease or just because you are feeding the brain with the wrong cues with which to retrieve the information. Researchers have also found out that the effectiveness of human memory reduces with age. It is not very clear why but it seems that the brain cells are particularly susceptible to ageing. While some will quickly assume that forgetting basic things like the names of familiar people could be an onset of Alzheimer's, this is not necessarily so. Finally...
Forgetting is a Good Thing
Too much of everything is bad ~ A Nigerian Saying
In another post here, we talked about how it is not such a terrible thing that the brain does not allow us to see every detail of every stimulus every time. We talked about the people who do so and agreed that they are always bombarded by a deluge of information to the extent that the condition could easily result to diseases like autism if their brain capacity is not big enough to process the enormous information thrown at it all the time.
In the same vein, it would seem that the statement **forgetting is a good thing** is counter-intuitive but it is not. Without the ability of the brain to forget some things, it would not be able to assign priority to other things; it would not be able to make new connections and learn new things, updating knowledge and displacing wrong information would be impossible. Imagine not being able to forget that traumatic event from your childhood or details of the person that hurt you badly. Forgetting is a mechanism of the brain to help us remember what is important. The cannabinoid system was discovered recently. It is a system which helps put the painful experience of heartbreaks, trauma and other negative experiences in the background so that we may continue to live normally without the pain after some time. Therefore it is not just the passage of time that heals all wounds, the cannabinoid system helps.Finally, if someone with a healthy brain forgets essential things, it is because they have not signalled the brain of the importance of the information.
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