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.

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