STRANDOMS: the stray and random thoughts
December 2024
Prof. S. Ramkumar
Education
Why we remember:
by Dr. Charan Ranganath
Have you ever thought of walking into a room and having no memory of why you went there in the first place! And you may or may not remember of what it was after sometime when you are doing something else?
Do you forget sometimes on whether you have really locked the main door of home, after leaving home?
Do you sometimes have a doubt of whether you have switched off the knob of the cooking gas, after you leave home?
In one of an exciting reading the author, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California at Davis, looks at the fundamentals and functionalities of memory, in an interesting, exciting and “event”ful manner.
Many insights are reassuring to people who always have a feel (and many feel!) “I am forgetting” or “I don’t remember “
When we enter a room and forget why we walked in , he says there is no memory problem – it is actually a normal consequence of what memory researchers call event boundaries. The context change that occurs with an “event boundary” has significant implications for episodic memory. “Event boundaries” happen all the time and don’t necessarily require a change in location.
The book puts forward useful and reassuring research findings on memory.
The chapter on “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” discusses on how we can remember more by memorizing less. Human brain is not a memorization machine; it is a “thinking machine” The brain organizes it as “Schema”: a kind of mental frame work that allows our minds to process, organize, and interpret a great deal of information with minimal effort.
“Our memories are malleable and sometimes inaccurate because our brains were designed to navigate a world that is constantly changing”.
There are more concepts and situations that relate to our daily lives; science, written in a lighter and personal mode.