Video: Remembering and Forgetting

The Discovering Psychology video entitled "Remembering and Forgetting" teaches me several lessons about memory.

-We are capable of remembering 100 trillions things, which is fascinating, but despite the vast capacity, we do forget things.

-Motivation, concentration and rehearsal enhance the ability to remember. This is why we need to concentrate when studying for a test.

- The information comes in to the sensory memory then into short-term memory then eventually into long-term memory. When we want to retrieve information, the information will come from the long-term memory to the short-term memory and out.

-As mentioned in the video, the long term memory is limitless and the short-term memory can hold only about 7 pieces of information before losing them or before transferring them in to the long-term memory. To increase the capacity of short-term memory, the method of chunking could be used. Chunking is to group information together. Relating old memory with new input will also increase the tendency to remember new information. Using mnemonic devices will also increase the tendency to remember.

-The video also refers to Hermann Ebbinghaus as he was one of the earliest psychologists to study this aspect of psychology. In his experiment, Ebbinghaus studies nonsense syllables and tries to remember it. He found out that the more time he practice on Day 1, the less time it takes for him to relearn the syllables on Day 2.

- What we remember depends on who we are and our experiences.

- Lastly, there is no specific part of the brain that store memory; instead, the whole brain contributes to memory. When a neuron dies, we forget the information held by that neuron.