VII. Memory
Human memory is an imperfect record of dubious origin.
Part of human memory is based on perception, but it is never entirely complete. It was suggested earlier that we do not give attention to everything that we sense (we walk past a thousand people on a busy sidewalk and while we see every one of their faces we do not recall them), and it has been suggested that maybe we do notice everything in every detail but simply fail to remember it. The argument is academic - but in terms of memory there can be no argument that our recall of sensations is partial and limited.
We also have the a capacity to recall abstract ideals. When we read a passage, whether narrative or expository, our eyes sense only the letters on the page - but we can remember the things in the story and even abstract concepts. "Ignorance is bliss" is a familiar saying, but when we heard or read it we did not experience ignorance nor bliss - nor are these concepts anything that can be understood through the senses at all - but we remember the relationship between two entirely abstract concepts.
Another part of human memory is entirely fabricated. Told a story that includes a man riding a horse, people will remember the color of the horse even if it was never mentioned - and swear vehemently that they remember that specific detail being mentioned. It never was, but the detail was fabricated by their own mind in imagining the scene so that a complete picture could be committed to memory.
Memory as Experience
The importance of memory can best be recognized if we imagine life without it: each moment is a new experience in an unfamiliar environment. We would stare blankly at people, places, or things, because would not recall what they are. We would not remember, in the course of doing something, why we were doing it. We would have no knowledge of the world and no ability to act.
It is only through memory that we have any knowledge. For example, you know a friend when you see him, or you know what a knife is and how it can be used when you see one. But to say that you "know" really means that you remember them. The perception of a person or a thing causes memories to be aroused.
Memory is not merely a response, but a chain of responses. The perception we have at the moment causes us to remember events of the past. When you hear a song, your memory brings to bear an instance in the past when you heard it. Remembering that moment causes you to remember other things. The past is retrieved through a chain of connections between memories.
Memory can also be obstructive. We may become so engrossed in our daydreaming of the past that we become oblivious to the present - or at the very least our past memories influence the way we react in the present. A person bitten by a horse as a child remembers that incident each time they see a horse, and aside of the emotional impact may cause them to disregard the qualities of the animal he is seeing and perceive it to be a threat.
Memory accumulates over the course of our lives, which also has its benefits and detriments. Older people have a rich ideational life, and a lot of information to draw upon in understanding what is currently before them - but they do tend to lose their curiosity and objectivity as a result. Their memory tells them that some things are unimportant and should not be given attention, or suggests that things of a certain appearance have certain properties and characteristics and we ignore their actual nature. A child, meanwhile, is curious about the world and learns about things such as they are, but he has no ability to reflect or think upon things or to draw upon his experiences.
Physiological Basis of Memory
Pyle can offer only that memories are stored and retrieved within the brain, but is vague the mechanism, stating only that "brain activity" is arranged to preserve perceptions and ideas from the past.
It has been observed that patients whose brains have suffered damage often lose their existing memories or the ability to form new memories of a given kind. Their erratic behavior is often attributed to perceptual or cognitive disability, but even in those instances it may be more related to memory than current stimuli - as noted before, all thought and perception depends on memory.
He indicates that psychologists "have been trying for many years" to explain how memory works as a biological function, but have not done so, so we can only speculate about memory from behavior rather than being able to understand it from a perspective of physiology.
(EN: Even neurologists of the present day aren't able to satisfactorily say much more. They physical argument has largely been ruled out, as we possess the equipment to investigate the structure of the brain and find no physical evidence of memory in the organ. A chemical argument remains, suggesting that memory is stored in molecules, but this is weak because it cannot be accounted for by physical analysis - scientists cannot find chemical traces of memory in the brain, nor is there even a gross representation of the physical existence of clusters of "memory molecules" in the organ. The electrical argument seems most plausible, suggesting that memories consist of interlinked pathways in the brain, like circuits in a computer chip, that maintain a low-intensity charge to preserve memories - but again there is little physical evidence to support this notion: we can measure electrical movements in the brain and find no patterns of activity that can be reliably identified as memories. And so, the best answer is that science is still working on it, and psychology of memory remains largely philosophical.)
Age and Gender
A common misconception of memory is that it is sharper when we are young, but such is not the case. "Numerous experiments have shown that all aspects of memory improve with age." For example, young children cannot remember a long sentence as well as older ones, nor recall a series of numbers or words in as few repetitions as an older child or an adult. Their ability to remember the details of a short story or an actual account are in reality much worse at younger ages.
What is most different in youth is the randomness of their memory: they do not have the experience to sort out what things are important and what things are unimportant, and we are often surprised by the things they happen to recall.
For example, when engaged in a conversation an adult will focus their attention on the ideas the other person is expressing and can recall the significant parts of the dialogue, but will not remember the color of a scarf that the person was wearing at the time - whereas a child will not be able to remember significant details about the conversation but will recall the color and pattern of the scarf in vivid detail. Our astonishment at the child's recollection of a detail we disregarded as unimportant leads to the misperception of the child's memory skills, but he remembers very little and nothing of importance.
In examination of the memories of children, it is also observed that girls excel boys in their memory at almost every age. This should not be surprising because during the developmental years, girls mature faster than boys in their bodies, becoming taller and heavier then boys of their age - so it should not be suspiring that their minds develop faster as well.
(EN: Gender differences are a bit specious and ill-defined, and subject to some caution because of political influence - but that said there is a difference in memory between the genders: girls and boys seem to be attuned to paying attention, hence remembering, different things - which is evident demonstrable differences in the skills they develop. There is a perpetual argument over whether this is because of physical or social differences - but until the biological basis of memory can be established and hard evidence shown that the attention and memory are caused by specific physical differences, evidence is selective and anecdotal and the differences among individuals due exclusively to gender is speculative.)
The Habituation of Memory
It has been observed that memory can be improved by practice. It is routinely noticed that during a course of a memory experiment, a subject is able to recall ever longer sequences of numbers of letters and ever more detail about images and stories. The experiment itself is in effect training the memory to become better at a task.
It might be said that memory skills are like physical skills in this manner, but because physical skills are driven by memory (we improve because we remember the more effective methods) this is not a comparison but a tautology.
Our memory improves in terms of both volume, accuracy, and speed. That is, a person who practices at memorizing poetry can remember longer poems and make fewer mistakes in repeating them. The speed at which memory is acquired also improves: in the author's own experiments he has observed that a person who is asked to study "a certain amount of material" can, with practice, assimilate it faster: a subject that required an hour to memorize the information will, after practicing for about a month, can memorize the same amount of information in fifteen minutes.
(EN: I'm reminded of the oral tradition of literature - the orators of the ancient world could memorize many long stories. The most accomplished orators could recall sagas or epics, and while it is true that they were prone or improvising in their delivery, comparisons of transcripts of the same stories told multiple times by different people show that the retellings from memory were surprisingly consistent in most of the details.)
Tips for Improving Memory
Memory is stored perception, so the first requirement of having a good memory is having good perception. We are naturally inclined to recall tend to have been experienced in a "vivid and intense" incident such that the details come to our attention.
Where we are able to control our exposure to things - or in education, where things are presented for others to remember - we must then present it in a way that it comes to attention. This is the reason that teaching takes place in a classroom environment and not a busy market square where there are many other stimuli of greater interest and intensity than the lesson. Removing distractions is a method of focusing attention.
Perception is also based on sensory perception, so we are better able to recall an item that we have seen than one that has been described to us in words. (EN: I recall a study in textbook design that suggested this: an illustration or diagram can reinforce a concept, but even a "decorative" photograph provides visual stimulus to recall information that was experienced at the same time.)
Another requirement is for the information we receive through our senses should be understandable. While curiosity may cause us to give attention to something that we don't understand, memory is better served by presenting new information in a way that it can be contextualized with existing knowledge.
This is the reason that writing and teaching follow a given form and structure: the person who receives the information is given a framework by which to remember the details of a lecture, and the lecture is structured to teach basic ideas before expounding upon them.
In that way a student who does not have a memory of algebra will be hopeless in learning trigonometry: the concepts, without concept, are abstract and have no way of nestling themselves into exiting knowledge.
Another method that is successful in memorizing facts is repetition. When we do something once, we recognize it as being unusual and the mind has no need to record information about it. But when it is done the second or third time, we begin to recognize common details, and there is the sense that the same thing will be done again in future, so the mind records details that it expects to be useful in those future occurrences.
Repetition is the reason that we are able to develop skill at tasks, but it also enables us to "cram" something into memory simply by repeating a phrase. Children learn the words to songs by singing them over and over, and learn their multiplication tables by chanting equations.
Structure is also supportive of memory. New facts are readily integrated into ones that already exist in memory - but even if an entire subject is new, it is easier to learn information if there is a structure. A narrative structure is most common - as each incident in a sequence is connected to the one before and the one after - and categorization also suits the mind: if objects are presented in five groups of three items apiece, they are more easily remembered than if all fifteen were presented individually - and better still if the items in each group have some features that are similar to one another and distinctive from those in other groups.
The notion of habit is resurfaced: we remember things that we have done multiple times in the same manner. And so if we mean to make a habit of something, we must ensure that we are attentive to the precise conditions and procedures or the desired response - to remember what to do when the trigger is encountered. Conversely, to break a habit often means making a situation so unusual that the mind does not fall back on remembered responses, or is not able to create the association of response to stimulus because the stimuli are inconsistent.
Pyle also notes that the manner in which items are organized is often arbitrary. Except where things are encountered as a set in nature, the manner in which they are grouped is entirely the choice of the individual who is organizing them. One of the chief differences among individual memory is the way that they mentally organize information in the first place - whether their schema makes sense, and whether it can be activated by a given trigger.
There's a bit of advice for students and teachers: learning must stop when the student does not understand a lesson - because if the pattern of organization is not developed, future knowledge will not be able to associate itself. This is particularly true of narratives and chronologies - the ability to recall a sequence of events ends at the last item remembered, and it is very difficult to remember a story that has gaps between events. The teacher must be sure that information is well-organized, and the student should stop and ruminate if he fails to make a connection.
Another very important factor in memory is relevance. Facts have significance and are worth remembering because they mean something. It is far more difficult to memorize a list of nonsense words or words that one does not recognize than it is to memorize a list of known terms.
Kinds of Memories
It is generally thought that there are different kinds of memories, though there are many classification schemas and none of them entirely satisfactory in their ability to make clear distinctions between categories.
We may, for example, separate memories based on sense-perception and those based on abstract reasoning, but this becomes problematic because our perception of the world is based on abstract ideas that cause us to remember actual sensory details inaccurately - omitting, changing, and adding to the memory.
We might also consider different kinds of data in sense memory, to speak of our memory of sights, sounds, scents, and the like. But our memory of a thing may include data from these different categories that is closely associated.
While these various attempts have not been satisfactory, the work in this area has provided evidence that our facility with memory is not uniform nor equal. One person may be better at remembering the visual details, another might be better at remembering concepts, etc. Nor is it known whether the facility people have for different kinds of memories caused by differences in the physical structure of the brain or merely based on experience. Insofar as it can be studied, it is apparent that both have an influence.
Memory and Thinking
Psychologists attempt to distinguish between the processes of memory and thinking, but the distinction is entirely unclear because the two are interrelated. To say that someone shouldn't rely on memory but reason things out is nonsense - as our reasoning is based on memory.
We do, however, recognize that that simply recalling memories is different to thinking. Certain species of bird mimic sounds that they hear, and effectively repeat things that they do not understand when they perceive an environmental trigger. A parrot can be trained to "say" four when its trainer says two and two, but it does not apply any reason when given this response.
The ability of thought is considered to be more improvisational. It depends upon memories, but combines or modifies them and demonstrates out ability to understand the relationship between things. But we cannot think without memory, any more than we can sculpt without stone - the action is meaningless without material to work upon.
Pyle uses geometry as an example of how this works: the student of geometry memorizes certain principles by rote, such as the method of determining the missing measurement of one angle of a triangle if the other two are known. But to demonstrate that he thinks, not merely remembers, he must demonstrate his ability to adapt this principle to solve an original problem, not merely to repeat the solution to a problem that he has already seen solved by someone else.
Memory and Academic Performance
Memory plays a major role in every aspect of our life, but it is most evident in schoolwork where our ability to store and access information in memory is most directly practiced, demonstrated, and measured.
Pyle claims to have done extensive experiments to determine the correlation of memory skills to academic performance in schools, comparing scores on memory tests to grades - and every test shows a very high correlation. Regardless of the academic subject - mathematics, science, foreign language, history, etc. - it is clear that the ability to gain and retrieve information from memory is required to learning it.
However, he also recognizes that "memory" encompasses a broad range of skills. To remember something, one must be attentive to it, understand it, correlate it to existing knowledge, store the information, and be able to retrieve it. So memory testing is vague and considers the aggregation of all these abilities. It stands to reason that some individuals may be particularly skilled in one of these tasks but not others, but there doesn't seem to be a way to assess them separately, and what such tests evaluate is "mental power" in a general sense.
The relationship between memory and academic ability is exponential. A person with a better memory does not merely learn faster, but learns more. His apprehension of fundamental facts enables him to more quickly grasp more advanced concepts. For example, a student who has a better memory can give more attention, and gain more benefit, from an advanced lecture because he remembers the basic concepts. A person with a duller memory will not "get" what is being said presently, or will be distracted by the need to look up or strain to recall something he has forgotten, and this takes his attention away from the lesson at hand.
However, students who have a good memory also comes to depend upon it. He is less likely to look something up when he is unsure of it, but rely on an inaccurate memory. He is less likely to ruminate on his lessons because he feels that he will be able to remember them, and he is less likely to be attentive to his work because he is overconfident in his ability to remember.
In all, the good habits of study were made to accommodate those who have average or poor memories - so there is an area of overlap in academic performance where the best of the low-memory students, through disciplined study habits, outperform the worst of the high-memory students.
The absolute best of students, in Pyle's observations, are the students with high memory skills who avail themselves of good study habits rather than being overconfident on their capacity to remember. It may be difficult to encourage a bright student to be a hard worker as well, as he can in fact get by on his natural intelligence and sees no need to work at learning, but it is necessary if he is to achieve his full potential.
Duration of Memory
It is generally believed that memory has a finite duration, and that memories are lost over time. Pyle mentions a few experiments that investigated this notion.
The first test involved students who were read a story and asked immediately to write down what they remembered, and then asked a month later to write down what was remembered. Naturally, students recalled fewer details after a month. However, it was observed that those who provided more details in the immediate test also provided more details in the later test - which dispels the notion that people who pay attention to fewer things remember them for longer. The more a person remembers immediately, the more they will retain.
A similar experiment at Columbia University challenged students to spend a fixed amount of time studying German vocabulary words. What was measured was the number of words they could learn in that time, and how much of that was retained later. Again, it was shown that those who learned the most words retained more of the knowledge - a higher percentage, not just a higher number.
Another experiment involved a short passage of about a page in length. The passage would be read and the subject would be asked to reproduce all the facts - and if he failed, the passage would be read again. The measurement was of the number of iterations it took for the person to remember everything. A month later, it was found that those subjects who needed the fewest repetitions to recall the facts had a better recollection. So while this supports the notion that repetition is necessary to memorize, it dispels the notion that more is always better and that there is any value in rumination after the information has been learned.
A similar experiment involved giving students a nonsensical sentence to memorize. In this case, it was read to them but once per day, and the number of days it required to be able to repeat the sentence was measured. Once they had learned the sentence, they stopped the daily exercise. Thirty days later, the students were called back and asked to repeat the sentence. The memory of those who had learned it in the fewest repetitions was again best.
What all of this points to is that the notion that the common belief that people who learn slowly learn better is entirely misconstrued. Fast learners have better memories.
Methods of Memory Training
It has been observed that participants of memory experiments improve the speed and accuracy of their memory even in a relatively short series of repetitive memory tasks - and so it stands to reason that the memory can be trained. But given that memory involves multiple capacities, it is unclear exactly what aspects are improved.
He mentions an "extensive and thorough experiment" by an English psychologist (Sleight) who trained one group of pupils at memory tasks, drilling them until they showed considerable improvement, then testing that group against an untrained one. His findings were that the pupils with trained memories were better at the exact tasks at which they had been trained, but no better at memory tasks for which they had not been trained - indicating that the training had only improved very specific skills rather than improving memory in general.
Thus, the conclusion is that memory training is specific - that performance at a specific task can be improved but that this renders no general benefit to memory skills.
Learning by Wholes
Another set of experiments have shown that learning things by wholes (reading an entire paragraph from beginning to end) is more efficient than learning in parts (memorizing one sentence, then the next, then the next) when attempting to commit something to memory verbatim. This has been tested with both prose and poetry.
Pyle figures that this is because when content is broken into parts, the mind must store the parts separately as well as storing the relationship between them, whereas the whole contains more content but does not require assembly.
He does concede that this finding has only been tested with verbatim learning (the ability to repeat the words as written) and may no apply to understanding (the ability to understand the concepts and explain them in one's own words).
Cramming
Given the habit of some students to neglect their studies until the days preceding an examination and then attempt to study a large amount in a short time, the practice of "cramming" information into memory has received some interest in academic circles.
What has been found is that cramming is not effective. Students who cram do demonstrate some improvement in verbatim memory (but not understanding) over those that do not study at all for retaining information in the short term - so cramming does help in passing examinations. However, it does not render the benefit of long-term retention: the information is forgotten quickly and does not become part of permanent knowledge.
A critical detail in this is that cramming is better than not studying at all, but inferior in both short-term and long-term memory to the practice of regular study. The best approach to study is to regularly review smaller amounts of material at regular intervals, which improves both verbatim memory and understanding. This approach creates better memory through repetition over time, as well as integrating new information with that which is already understood.
However, it is noted that cramming has its purpose: if it is necessary to have a mass of facts for a temporary purpose that will be of no use afterward, cramming is indeed the proper method. For example, an attorney who is preparing his final argument for a judge - a speech he will deliver once and never again - would be better served by cramming than by learning.
Since education focuses on instilling students with permanent knowledge that will stand them well later in life, cramming is counterproductive in the academic environment. Students may fare better on the examination, but the knowledge is not retained, which is a detriment later in life as well as when they take advanced courses that depend on the information learned in prerequisite ones.
(EN: From my own brief stint in education, I recall it being stressed to faculty in training that educating students well in the basic courses was essential to enabling them to complete their degrees because it was believed that much of the drop-out among upperclassmen was because they failed to retain the material from their freshman and sophomore courses.)
Memory Training Methods
In an academic setting, the teacher's methods and general conduct are often as significant and possibly even more significant than the student's study habits. Students' habits affect their own learning, but teacher's methods affect the learning of every student.
Going back to experiments in memory, people show greater ability to memorize things that they understand than to understand things that they do not understand. For example, a properly-structured sentence is easier to remember than an unstructured jumble of random words. So in that sense, the person who composes the sentence has a strong influence on the learner's ability to remember it - and the same can be said for a lesson that is composed by a teacher.
And so, an important function of the teacher is to understand the workings of memory and present information in a form that makes it easier to retain: to explain fundamental concepts before getting into more advanced ones, to present lessons in an intelligible manner, to repeat and remind rather than using a once-and-done approach to material.
It has also been previously discussed that the false notion that children learn more quickly than adults is entirely false - the more knowledge a person has, the more quickly and effectively new knowledge can be assimilated into their mental context - as such older students learn better and faster than younger ones.
But there is also the problem of new information that conflicts with existing information, so teaching older students often involves making more of an argumentative case to accept the knowledge rather than merely presenting it and expecting it will automatically replace what is already stored in memory.
He mentions language teaching, specifically, in that it has been observed that young children learn the sounds and words of a foreign language more quickly because their native language is not so ingrained as it is in adult learners, who are very set in their pronunciation, cadence, inflection, syntax, and other conventions of their language.
(EN: The section ends with some speculation about the appropriate age to begin learning certain subjects, but this seems entirely speculative on Pyle's part. His approach is interesting because it deals largely with perception: he suggests that young children should learn things that are visual and concrete and that abstract subjects should come later in life.)
Memory as Association
A fundamental characteristic of memory is that it is associative: ideas are attached to other ideas and it is through this network of connection that things are retrieved from memory.
The association is most readily recognized then memory is triggered by a sensory stimulus. The sight or scent of an orange calls to mind associated information: facts about oranges as a fruit or incidents in which an orange (or even the color orange) was present.
Association can also be recognized when one concept triggers another: even the word "orange" conjures up these memories. Or more abstractly, a mention of the "American Revolution" brings to mind the various individuals, incidents, and objects associated to it: John Adams, the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence all readily come to mind by association.
Learning also takes place in an associative manner. The value of structuring education into subjects and classes into lectures is that they provide containers of associated facts, and they are assimilated with those facts that exist in memory but are often isolated by category, which explains why students seem to excel in some subjects and struggle in others.
A common memory trick is to associate something abstract, such as a person's name, with something concrete. They very manner in which we learn peoples' names is by associating them to details about their appearance - often facial features. We often have difficulty remembering a name without seeing (even in our minds) a person's face, as well as facility with remembering the name of someone we haven't met in many years when we see them again.
Pyle briefly mentions the phenomenon of temporary memory loss - something we ought to know fails to come to mind. This is because the association we used in our memory is not present. If we remember a man's name because he often wears the same necktie, we may forget it if he changes the tie. This is very common when we encounter someone in a particular role or venue: we may fail to recognize a policeman whom we have seen daily if he is out of uniform.
Pyle attempts to explain the reason we may not remember something immediately, but it springs to mind an hour or a day later - but his explanation is unsatisfactory. (EN: He speaks of nerves as if they are pipes with a temporary blockage and the material that was blocked flows out when the blockage is cleared. It's a clever analogy but biologically inaccurate.)
He also suggests that we sometimes remember things through a chain of correlations. This can be observed in casual conversations that move in a rather random manner from one topic to another to a third. But it is also seen when we have difficulty remembering something until we think of something else that provides a missing link. The longer the chain between one concept and another, the more difficulty we have remembering one when we think of the other.