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Drew Seitter
Ms. Selman
UNIV 111
2 November 2014
Magic of Memory
Think back to what you did a week ago. Now what you did a month ago. It gets
increasingly harder right? Now think back to what you did on your last birthday. Now the one
before that. Maybe you remember what you did on you 16th birthday better than you remember
what you did on your last one. Perhaps there is one date that sticks out more than any other day
in your life and you remember exactly what occurred that day that makes it so important to you.
“Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” by Alan Jackson exemplifies this idea as
the songwriter gives the listener the task of remembering their reaction to the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001. What causes this? What gives humans the ability to make file cabinets in
our memory with dated folders containing the sights and sounds of that day? The answer lies
within our brain and its indescribable, magical abilities.
There are many unexplainable adversities that we as a human race have been able to
conquer to achieve the success we have. One key factor to our abilities is our capability to
remember our past and learn from our mistakes in order to avoid repeated failures. This ability
comes from the makeup of the human brain. The form of memory I am describing is known as
declarative long-term memory and is controlled by a part known as the medial temporal lobe in
our brain. When we remember a certain event from our past, the specific memory has been
through three stages; encoding, consolidation, and retrieval (psych-stanford.edu pg 201). The key
stage that contributes to what makes us have memories which we may recall better than others is
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the encoding stage. This stage occurs as the event occurs and what makes memories more or less
encoded in our brain is the attention level which we give the event. For example, on your 16th
birthday, you were fully attentive to the events happening because it was important to you.
However, say a month ago, the events occurring may not have affected you as much, therefore
causing you to give the events less attention, and causing your brain to encode these events less
than important ones. The specific cause of what is remembered or forgotten is credited to neural
responses in our brain as an event happens (psych-stanford.edu pg 208). When an event has a
higher impact on you, you are more attentive and elaborative of what is happening, therefore
sending more neural responses. The greater amount of neural responses cause more encoding of
the event in your brain, resulting in more specific features of the event to be passed on into the
next stage of long-term memory, consolidation. Consolidation occurs over an extended period of
time after the event occurs and happens because of a constant recollection of the event. After a
certain prolonged period of time which the event has been repeatedly recalled, the memory
becomes separate of the medial temporal lobe which encoding occurs. Once the event has been
successfully consolidated, it is transferred in the brain as a memory to the lateral cortical regions.
The last stage of memory is the retrieval process, which becomes activated by certain cues. For
example, when I asked you what you did on your 16th birthday, it was a cue which provoked
your brain to find the file in your brain titled “My 16th Birthday.” When Alan Jackson wrote the
song, he included the lyrics “On that September day” (Jackson). This was written for listeners
who knew about the September 11 attacks and was intended to send a cue causing them to search
for the file in their brain cabinet labeled “September 11, 2001.”
When an event occurs, its fate has one of two options-to be remembered or forgotten.
Through research, we have discovered tips we can use to control the determination of the episode
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in our brain. The Bucks County Community College has developed keys for their students in
order to help for studying to help remember subjects which they might be struggling in
(faculty.bucks.edu). We can relate these subjects to events that occur in our lives. They began by
evaluating four theories as to which we may forget certain events in our memory. The first is
fading, which states that if you do not continually review a subject or event, it will be forgotten.
This theory was assessed in a study done with the students by asking them about remembering
textbook materials over a certain period of time which concluded that the percentage of material
remembered decreased as the time past had increased. Relating this to our question stated earlier,
we determine that as time goes by, the events we encounter day by day get lost in our mind. The
second theory to explain why we forget is called the Retrieval Theory. This states that when you
have forgotten something, it is due to the fact that the subject has been misplaced in the file
cabinet of our brain. Whether the subject has disappeared from the cabinet or has been lost, it has
the same fate-it has been forgotten. So if you have misplaced the file of what you did a month
ago, it is lost in your mind. The third theory is the Interference theory, which is found upon the
idea of limited space in long-term memory. Because of this limited space, every time you are
adding new information, there becomes a clash between the new information and older
information in the brain. As a result, some information replaces other info and causes it to be lost
and forgotten. So every day, you are adding new events to your mind and these experiences get
caught in with past experiences and there becomes a struggle for your mind to retain every piece
of information of every event. The last belief as to why we forget knowledge in our brain is due
to what is known as interactive interference. This theory can be based upon the idea that when
you are comprehending material or events, you tend to put the most focus on what occurs first
and last. This causes everything in the middle to be in a sort of haze. For example, relating to the
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September 11 terrorist attacks, many people are able to recall where they were when they first
heard of the events occurring that day. Because of all of these factors occurring in our minds, it is
no surprise that many events become lost in time.
After coming up with this list of reasons why we may forget items that are thrown into
our brain, the Bucks County Community College created a list of keys that you may use to
remember information taken in every day (faculty.bucks.edu). The first key is to choose to
remember by being interested and attentive to what is going on throughout the day. This can
explain why we may remember dates which important things occurred as our interest is higher
and therefore our attention is raised, creating more memories in our mind. The next is to
visualize things which you want to stay in your mind over an extended amount of time.
Visualizations are able to stay in our mind much better than words so picturing words causes the
words to stay in our brain longer and clearer. This could be why it is much easier to picture the
events of September 11 rather than remembering an article about the events. The third key is to
relate events and information together. When you do this, the material is able to link itself to
each other in your brain and make them easier to recall when you want to remember them. For
example, when you go on a vacation, the experiences link together in a file in your brain, making
the events easier to relive as a whole. The last key is to repeat the information you want
remembered in your head over and over until it has been engraved in your mind. So when you
constantly remember how great or devastating your 16th was, the event becomes engraved in
your mind for an extended time.
The bottom line as to why we remember events and material better than others is, as
memory researcher and specialist Edward Bolles stated, “We remember what we understand; we
understand only what we pay attention to; we pay attention to what we want.”
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(faculty.bucks.edu) Therefore, to answer our question as to why we remember some days more
than others, we remember best what we want to remember. The attacks of September 11 were
important to us because of the mass impact it had on our nation, therefore making our brains
want to remember what we did that day. When you are remembering your 16th birthday clearer
than your last birthday, it is because you wanted to remember your 16th birthday more for the
impact it had on you. Taking this to the extreme, there are more than likely events you recollect
on a daily basis that are events that have impacted your life hugely, causing a clear picture of that
occurrence in your brain which can last for an extremely long time, maybe even forever. In a
sense, these events have become a part of you as a human being. So you can credit a large part of
who you are today to the important memories of your past experiences. However, always keep in
mind that these memories were once present events which were important to you for some
reason or another. Therefore, I advise you to always stay aware of what is happening in the
world around you because you never know when one of those lasting memories might arise.
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Works Cited
“Encoding and Retrieval for Long-Term Memory.”
pag. 192-238. psych.stanford.edu: Web. 29 Oct. 2014.
Jackson, Alan. Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning). Keith Stegall, 2001. Print.
Meg Keeley. “Memory and the Importance of Review.” The Basics of Effective Learning. Bucks
County Community College, 1997.
N. pag. faculty.bucks.edu: Web. 29 Oct. 2014.