MEMORY CAN BE STRANGE

Memory is what education is all about. But what is memory? For us humans it is putting information into our brains and then being able to recall it later.

Memory can be capricious. Some things we remember easily, others just will not stay put, will not cone up when we want them to. The various inputs through our nerves to our brain obviously must do something to the brain to make it remember. So far our scientists are not sure exactly what that "something" is.

Our memories are not all alike. We tend to remember things we are interested In. There Is short term and long term memory. Short term Is used when we look up a phone number and remember it long enough to dial it.

Long term memory is holding on to it for future use. In school, this is typically long enough to take an examination. Then, If we do not have occasion to use the information, it may fade and be hard to recall.

There are ways to help us remember.. Inventors have provided us several ways to "remember', to record written or spoken speech and music, as well as pictures.

But for educational purposes, we are mainly concerned with the memory of our brain, how much information it can absorb from our teachers and the books we use, The trick is to retain that information long enough to pass the exam at the end of the course. When we do that with the required subject matter, then we can move from grade to grade and we can graduate in due course.

We can end up spending from 18 to 25 years of our life trying to memorize the things society thinks we should have in order to be called educated.

What can we do to help us with all of this memorizing. There are several things that can help.

     1. A keen interest in a subject

     2. Concentration and attention

     3. Repetition

     4. Writing it down and looking at it frequently

     5. Verbalizing

     6. Associating it with something else as a trigger to your memory.

As a computer memory must have an "address", so our brain memory needs a trigger, a cue, an association, to bring up a name, a place, or other information. We usually may not think of our memory as being unlocked by a key but that is often the case.

For example, I have a hard time with certain names, one is a street, called Quaker Lane. I don't know why this has bothered me so much. I tried to associate it with religion, the Quakers, but for some reason that did not work. What finally worked better was to associate it with earth quakes. That got me to where I could usually bring up the name in my memory.

Another name that bothered me a lot is Chelsea, which happens to be the name of President and Mrs. Clinton's daughter. It is also the name of an adopted baby girl by a good friend of ours. Yet, try as I would, the name would not come up when I needed it. I tried to associate it with jell, for Chel, but that did not work either. My best success was to write it down and to go look a it periodically.

Nothing seems more fundamental to our memories than repetition. Repetition seems to put a dent, groove, or mark on our brains. It is sort of like the old time country mail man and his horse. The horse would get to know all the stops and turns.

Memory is especIally important in speech making, keeping one's thoughts flowing while on one's feet in front of an audience. Here again practice is of great importance. In a democracy, an ability to speak in public is so important that Public Speaking should be a required subject for all students.

The TV game Jeopardy is a memory exercise. It tests how widely a person has read and how fast one can recall information. Some times information that I know or have known well resists recall. Yet if I keep thinking about it, maybe overnight, it will suddenly come up.

Can our memories get overloaded? Do they have a finite capacity? Educators don't act as if they do. They keep piling on more work, courses and degrees.. Surely the gray matter in our heads is a marvelous mechanism.