Events forgotten
1. The greatest amount of forgetting occurs directly after finishing the learning task.
2.The greatest amount of forgetting occurs rapidly, during the first day.
3. Forgetting is still sizable during the first fourteen days.
4. Forgetting slows down after two weeks, but again there is not much left to forget.
5. Remembering what you have heard is usually more difficult than remembering what you have read.
6. Forgetting is sometimes incorrectly labelled. Normally the causes are
1) Pseudo-Forgetting - You never had it forgetting
2) Mental Blur forgetting.
Your brain is the only organ in your body that can¡¦t feel pain. Because of this, brain surgery can be carried out without a general anaesthetic. You are given something to numb the scalp and skull, and then the surgeon can drill through. But, if the drill slipped and started to gouge into your brain, you wouldn¡¦t feel a thing. The lack of pain receptors is a real bonus for brain surgeons. Instead of having a patient who just lies there like a sack of meat, they have somebody who can tell them what¡¦s happening as they probe and snip.
In 1935 a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield started some experimental work at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. A patient lay in the operating theatre with the top of her skull off while Dr Penfield inserted slim electrodes into her brain. The idea was to trigger a small electric current through each electrode in turn, thus stimulating the area of the brain in which it was buried. That way, he could learn which parts of the brain did what.
When everything was in place, he sent in the first little jolt of electricity and asked the patient what was happening. She told him her ear felt funny. Another little jolt and her foot twitched. And so on. Then something strange happened. He sent in a jolt and the patient reported she was back in childhood, hearing her mother call to her to come into the kitchen. This had happened thirty years before, but every detail was still there - the wind in her hair, the expression on her mother¡¦s face, each word spoken ... everything. It had all been stored perfectly in the woman¡¦s memory.
Dr Penfield continued his experiments, up to 1960 and showed again and again, with patient after patient, that he could bring up memories so vivid people actually thought they were reliving bits of their past. He checked their stories where he was able and found what the patients remembered after those little jolts was what had really happened to them, sometimes many years ago. It seems that all of us come equipped with the perfect photographic memory. We literally store every detail of everything we see, hear, touch, taste and smell. So with the perfect photographic memory, why do we forget things?
Earlier this century, Psychologists came up with two main theories. The first was that memory traces simply fade with time. This sounds sensible and likely since most things seem to fade with time. Sensible or not, experiments finally showed this theory to be wrong. Memory traces don¡¦t fade. Penfield and others have shown clearly they last forever. The second main theory is known as the interference theory of forgetting. The idea behind this was that old memories are sometimes crowded out by new ones. This seems wrong as well because if new memories push out old ones, then the more we learn; the more we are going to forget.
