Why People Forget?
Some Clues To Remember

Dr. Niranjan Prasad Upadhyay

IN general, people forget more and more as time passes. An hour after a party ends, you probably could remember most of the people who were there. Two days later, you might recall only a few of the guests. A month later, you probably would remember even fewer. Scientists have devoted much study to why the passage of time makes people unable to remember things they once knew. Measuring forgetting is only the first step in the long journey toward explaining why forgetting occurs. Psychologists explore the possible causes of forgetting, looking at factors that may affect encoding, storage , and retrieval processes.

Adaptive

The function of remembering and its converse, forgetting, are normally adaptive. Learning, thought, and reasoning could not occur without remembering. On the other hand, forgetting has many functions, including time orientation by virtue of the tendency of memories to fade over time; adaptation to new learning by the loss or suppression of old patterns; and relief from the anxiety of painful experiences.

Interference occurs when the remembering of certain learned material blocks the memory of other learned material. If a friend moves, you may have difficulty recalling his or her new telephone number. The person’s old number may keep coming to mind and interfering with your remembering the new one. But after you have thoroughly learned the new number, you may not even be able to recall the old one. Generally, learned information may hamper a person’s ability to remember new material. This hampering process is called proactive interference. Likewise, the learning of new facts may interfere with the memory of something previously learned. Such interference is known as retroactive interference.

Retrieval failure is the inability to recall information that has been stored in the memory. You probably have had the experience of being unable to think of a name or some other piece of information that was on the tip of your tongue. Later, the information came to you naturally and effortlessly. Such temporary loss of memory, which occurs frequently, is called retrieval failure.

Scientists compare it to trying to find a misplaced object in a cluttered room. The information is not gone, but neither can it be recalled immediately.

Motivated forgetting occurs when people want to forget something. Some psychologists distinguish between two kinds of motivated forgetting, suppression and repression. In suppression, a person consciously tries to forget a memory. For example, singers might deliberately put out of their minds the memory of the last time they sang off key. In repression, a person unconsciously tries to forget a memory. The tendency to forget things in a manner-- one-does-not-want-to-think-about it-- is called motivated forgetting. Motivated forgetting is purposeful suppression of memories. A number of psychological experiments suggest that people do not remember anxiety-laden material with pleasure.

Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychiatrist who developed psychoanalysis as a method of treating mental illness, believed that people often get rid of memories of traumatic events through the process of repression. But scientists have not proved this theory.

Constructive processes can involve the creation of false memories. When you try to remember an event that happened years ago, you may recall only a few facts. Using those facts, you fill in the gaps with details that seem to make sense but may be untrue. The process of constructing probable happenings to tell a complete story is called confabulation. Confabulated memories seem real and are almost impossible to distinguish from memories of events that actually occurred.

A good way to help remember a piece of information is to rehearse (repeat) it a number of times. You can rehearse aloud or quietly to yourself. The more you rehearse, the more lasting the memory will be. In addition to repeating the information over and over, rehearsal also can involve elaborating upon the information. Certain people possess an exceptionally good memory. They may be able to memorise the names of all the state capitals or hundreds of names and numbers from a telephone book.

Some memory disorders result from physical damage to the brain. Such physical damage may occur due to head injuries, drug abuse, infection, and other causes. For example, a blow to the head can cause a person to forget events that occurred before the injury. Memory is the process by which information is stored in your brain. Amnesia is the process by which this information is physically erased from your memory banks, blocked off from easy access, or prevented from being stored in the first place. Amnesia has both biological and psychological causes.

Cases of amnesia (extensive memory loss) due to head injury are a useful source of clues about the anatomical bases of memory. There are two basic types of amnesia: retrograde and anterograde. In retrograde amnesia a person loses memories for events that occurred prior to the injury. Basically, in anterograde amnesia a person loses memories for events that occur after the injury.

Someone who suffers major brain damage in a car accident might lose months or even years of memories. Brain-injured people also can experience anterograde amnesia. This condition involves difficulty remembering events that occur after the injury. Memory difficulties also may result from emotional shock. For example, a person who witnessed a horrible accident may forget details of the accident. Memory loss in the absence of physical injury is known as psychogenic amnesia.
Forgetting does not proceed at a steady rate but seems to be most rapid immediately after the end of the learning period. At time goes on, the remaining knowledge becomes more and more stable. Most of what we forget is forgotten soon after it has been learned This fundamental fact was first discovered by psychologist, Ebbinghaus in 1885.

Means

Thus, memory experts believe that people can, with practice, increase their ability to remember. One of the most important means of improving memory is the use of mental aids called mnemonic devices. Mnemonic devices include rhymes, clues, mental pictures, and other methods. One of the simplest ways is to put the information into a rhyme.

Stopping Spitting Too Often, Too Much

By Sumati Mishra

SPITTING in public places is so common that we don’t even notice it anymore. But it must be shocking to tourists visiting our country, and particularly at a time, when we need them here so desperately.

Nobody seems really quite sure why people spit so much. In places like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in India, where a large percentage of the population chews tobacco and pan, the habit of spitting seems to have a more immediate reason. But what is surprising here is the fact that people of all ages and gender go on spitting merrily without any apparent rhyme or reason.

There are doubts as to whether spitting poses any grave danger to health. Dr. Chanda Bhambhani, a senior doctor at the Tribhuvan University, Teaching Hospital, Maharajgunj in Kathmandu feels that spitting on its own does not pose a health hazard, until it is done by a person infected with a contagious disease, like tuberculosis.

But what boggles even experts is why people spit so much as they do here. Dr Bhambani puts forth a number of possible reasons why somebody spits as a habit. It can be a result of unhealthy eating habit where most people take only two solid meals a day, one in the morning and other in night, leaving a long gap between the two. The afternoon ‘khaja’ most likely only helps aggravate acidity in the stomach. Dr Bhambani suggests that hyper-acidity can cause excessive spitting.

The other possible cause of excessive spitting, opines Dr Bhambani, can be a sign of worms in the stomach, which is quite common in Nepal with the quality of drinking water being highly questionable.
Dr A Dang, a senior physician, points to ‘compulsive disorder’ as a possible explanation for spitting habits.

But the question then is how can people resist spitting indoor or for long durations when they are watching, for example, a movie.

There are also fears over the impact of increasing pollution in the Kathmandu Valley that might be adding to this habit. Even doctors and environment specialists do not deny such a connection.
Explanations and guesses for possible reasons of this infernal habit vary according to the number of people attempting them. Bhawna Bista, a second year student of English at Tribhuvan University, says that the habit has increased noticeably since the time she was a child.

But most people would not agree with her and feel that the habit of spitting has always been here.
Vijay Dugar finds another reason for this habit. Nepal being a rather cold country, people drink lesser quantities of water that leads mouths to go dry more often, leading to the habit of spitting.
Madhu Pandey, teacher at Kendriya Vidyalaya blames the general dirt on streets and public places that ‘naturally’ makes a person want to spit. He adds that nobody would like to spit out and dirty a place if it is immaculately clean.

The question, however, is if large number of people go on spitting, how can streets or public places be clean. This argument, at best seems like the egg and chicken problem.

The government and the municipal authorities seem to be blithely unaware, or bothered, about this problem. A ban, or even punitive measures, can go a long way at least making people conscious about the problem.

But one thing is clear unless, people at individual level try to control their impulses, no municipal or government directive alone can help improve the situation.

Role Of Technology In Economic Boom

By P. Gopakumar

FOR the past decade, the boom in technology has driven much of the economic growth in the US and around the world. There was no better symbol of that tech boom than the personal computer that has become ubiquitous in homes, offices and schoolrooms. But for the first time since the personal computer came into general use, manufacturers around the world shipped fewer desktops and laptops last spring than they did the year before.

Decline

IDC and Dataquest, the two research firms that keep track of such things, estimated the decline at two percent and said the slump could continue at least through the summer, if not through the end of the year.

It is not just the personal computer either. Early estimates are that shipments of cellular phones and personal hand-held devices – two of tech sector’s hottest products-also slipped last quarter.
As a result of years discounts and promotions, the world has become saturated with high-tech gadgets. And without any new breakthrough products or services in the pipeline, many businesses and consumers seem content to hang on to stuff they have. Economists are wrestling with how to factor this boom and bust into their outlook for the US and global economies.

Until recently, the tech cycle and the business cycle were largely independent of each other. The tech sector was so small that its booms and busts did not significantly affects the direction of the overall economy. And because technology gave businesses the tools to improve efficiency and boost sales, companies tended to invest in it through good times and bad. But in the past decade, the technology sector seems to have had an outsised effect, suggesting to some economists that a full-fledged economic rebound would not begin until the technology cycle turns up.

“The tech cycle is such a big dog now. That if you cannot get that moving the rest of the economy will likely be very weak” according to an eminent economist and chief investment officer, Paulson, at well capital management in Minneapolis. “Technology has assumed the importance today that the auto industry had during the 1950, and 60’s.” Paulsen calculates that in the late 1990’s, the tech sector accounted for as much as half of the growth of the US economy-directly through the increased efficiency for companies that used it and the wealth it created for employed and stockholders.
At the same time, tech stocks were rising so quickly that they dragged most of the major stock indexes with them in spite of the fact that most of the other stock in the indexes were either treading water or falling in value. If it were not for the technology boom, the US would have gone into recession after the Asian finance crisis in 1998. Some analysts argue it was no coincidence that the economic downturn began following the bursting of the bottom bubble – not because those companies represented such a large portion of the economy, but because old-line businesses that had been spending furiously on web sites and economic strategies began to let up now that their survival was seemingly no longer at strike. The perception of the speed with which the economy would adapt to the Internet changed when the dotcom busted. Companies began to re-evaluate what they were already doing.

The death of dotcoms, however, was only the first blow to the technology boom. With stock prices falling and long delays in providing broadband internet services to many parts of the world, internet companies stopped providing big discounts for home computers in the hope of quickly building a big customer base for all the new broadband services they had planned. And with no killer applications or revolutionary new microprocessors coming along from software and chipmakers, businesses found that instead of replacing desktop computers every two to three years, they could wait three to four years.

Meanwhile, faced with delays in introducing next-generation cellular service in the US, phone companies stopped offering free telephones and deeply discounted rates to customers just for signing up with the service. As a result, the average time it took for customers to switch from one handset to another jumped from 12 months to 24 months according to some watchdogs.

Such bumps on the road are common in the technology cycle. What was significant this time was the effect it had on the overall economy. In Nepal, the telecom sector is one of the few sectors witnessing investment and growth in an economy, which is showing deepening signs of ennui. Without growth, the job situation is worsening, causing a serious problem even amongst educated unemployed.

Wonderful

Technology in the telecom sector has done some wonderful things; a survey on inflation in the economist pointed out that, thanks to it, the cost of telephony has come down over a hundred year period. Yet authorities in Nepal continue to deny consumers the full benefit of technology by creating legislative moats.