Blog Thought Piece #1
For September 19, 2007’s class
By Annie James

My prominent broad ascertainment of this particular essay of James’ is that one of the aspects of the concept of memory that essentially renders it a “phenomenon” is the fact that, though memory is more or less the absolute most important component of our abilities to live and function as human beings in every conceivable worldly context (“…just about everything we do or say depends on the smooth and efficient operation of our memory systems.” [Schacter, p. 2]), there is an extremely significant amount of aspects of it over which we seem to have literally no control. And this lack of control can manifest itself in a variety (and a contrasting one, at that) of ways. A very intuitive and almost superficial way of conceptualizing what memories are consists of thinking of them as things that must be consciously “created”, so to speak; we memorize facts and materials for a test, or directions to a certain place, or lines for a play. But as can be clearly derived from each piece of this week’s reading, and of course from the general knowledge of memory as a whole, this type of memory constitutes an extremely small portion of the entirety of the human memory system. Most of the things we remember are not only not created in this way, but are created with no conscious effort whatsoever. This fact holds true on the other hand as well, in terms of forgetting; we can hold thoughts, ideas and concepts in our working memory in the in the most efficient ways for just the amount of time that we need them to perform a given task, and then completely forget them for the rest of our lives because we have nothing concrete and/or personal to use as an “association” (discussed at length by James throughout the essay) by which to retrieve that memory. The outcome of the task facilitated by that working memory process is literally the only evidence that the thoughts, ideas or concepts contributing to it even happened at all.

James discusses the idea of a person being able to remember an event to which they paid no conscious attention by using the example of someone being aware of the fact that another person in his field of sight has changed his/her location in a room whilst the first person was only paying conscious attention to the assigned task of counting the lines of text on a piece of paper. (Paragraph 7, section 2, quoted from Exner) This memory, though seemingly inconsequential, is one of the key aspects behind memory rendering itself a phenomenon because no conscious or even explicable effort was made to hold that memory. Further along in James’ essay, he discusses the condition of aphasia – the inexplicable loss of word memory and ability to express oneself through speech. (Paragraph 15, section 8) Once someone is fluent, per se, in any language, it is the general and logically assumed result of this that the speaker does not have to make a conscious effort to remember the applicable grammar, vocabulary, etc. to form sentences and communicate with others. It is actually most disconcerting that the loss of this virtually essential functional ability is, in the condition of aphasia and related others, completely outside of our control, especially in the sense that, in general, the things that we do in fact make a conscious effort to remember are of radically less importance than those that we don’t; would you rather forget the route to your best friend’s house or forget how to have a conversation with your best friend (or everyone, for that matter)?

On the same note, and lending itself more to comparative discussion, is James’ discussion of the extremely complex process by which anything must officially enter the “memory proper”. He gives the example of a person seeing Mevius in first a temple and then in Titus’ house, and goes on to explain that although the person is perceiving Mevius in their working memory as being in Titus’ house (the current location), he/she actually recognizes Mevius by recalling the memory of the first time that he/she met Mevius – in the aforementioned temple. (Paragraph 8, section 3, quoted from Wolff) This is a perfect example of the phenomenal “double effect” of memory, in that even though a person is appropriately perceiving a given person in the present context, he/she is using the context of an episodic memory of a completely different time and place, with the only associative similarity being the presence of the other person, to identify the person and recall the information necessary to interact with that person. From this we can look more deeply into Schacter’s discussion of the distinction between episodic and semantic memory (p. 17). It is clear and logical that there is a distinction between the way that we remember facts about a certain place or person (semantic) and the way that we remember the first time we ever met that person (episodic), but then the question is: When does an episodic memory essentially become, or at least lend parts of itself to create, a semantic memory?

For if we contemplate our knowledge of memory, this transition is almost always, if not always, absolutely necessary in the formation of a semantic memory; it is likely that a person will not remember the very first time he/she was taught the alphabet or how to do arithmetic, but that particular episodic memory, even if it does not exist presently, certainly existed once, because it was obviously the initial foundation on which that person began to learn those basic skills. Even in the case that something that would be an episodic memory becomes, due to an insufficient duration of the time during which the episode was experienced, nothing but experiencing a “state of mind which is shut up to its own moment” (paragraph 2, section 2) and that never actually enters the memory proper, such as feeling “acute and intense” (paragraph 3, section 2, quoted from Richet) pain for no more than a hundredth of a second, we cannot ever say for certain whether or not that state of mind simply left our memory completely and forever, or whether it is retained, entirely dormant, in some part of the physical nerve-tissue and will go on to “at its own moment determine the transition of our thinking in a vital way, and decide our action irrevocably.” (Paragraph 4, section 2) And if this were the case, we would of course have no knowledge of it. So, is it repetition of and/or continuous training in or conscious exposure to something that facilitates an episodic memory becoming, or becoming a component of, a semantic memory? Possibly. But have we not just seen that even the smallest, shortest, most transient states of consciousness have the potential to directly affect a part of the memory that is consciously and vividly retained?

Let’s say for argument's sake that one of the first times that a child took a test in multiplication, the one mistake that he/she made was forgetting to write the respective “zeros” when multiplying the first number by the digits in tens, hundreds, thousands (and so on) places of the second number. This mistake would have of course resulted in him/her getting the answer wrong, and he/she would then presumably receive an explanation from his/her teacher of why it was a wrong answer and how to obtain a correct one in the future. Even though the moment of disappointment the mental correction of a minor procedural fallacy would probably not be remembered explicitly, if at all, by the child in the future, it is very likely that, each time that the child did handwritten multiplication in the future, he/she would make an extra effort, even if an unconscious one, to check for that mistake that he/she made the first time around. He/she would also be able to tell you “offhand”, so to speak, that that is a necessary step in multiplication. From this we see that both semantic and procedural memory can be affected by nothing more than a fleeting instant. So what exactly is involved in that transition period? And why, when it involves something on which we put so much conscious effort to remember, is the process by which the brain forms that memory almost completely out of our control?

A couple questions for class, since my response to just those two sources was pretty lengthy…

1. Do you think that people actually had better memories in the ancient times when events and ideas were never, or rarely, documented in writing and only stored, by various and elaborate mechanisms, in the brain itself? If so, do you think the changing environment and culture over that time span or the passing-on psychological genetics (“nurture or nature”) is a more prominent factor in it? (Bourtchouladze)

2. Do you think that emotion has enough of an impact on human memory to render the results of experiments with animal memory systems unable to be logically applied to our knowledge of the human memory, even though certain physical similarities have been identified? (Neisser)