October 24 Blog

Burke and MacKay’s ideas on retrieved information also intrigued me as I came to see it in my experiment subjects, and myself, in the TOT test. It was almost frustrating, this clinging to a familiar name even though I KNEW it was wrong. But when I would force it out of my mind, it was almost as if I was staring at a blank blackboard. I had nothing to go on. My other subjects felt the same way. One of them even told himself to, “forget that one!” I observed similar reactions to the TOT feeling that Catie did with her subjects. They would return and repeat the information they already knew about the actors, rather then try to cue up new information. This did not work for me in helping to cue up the name, but it did work for one of my subjects. This could be because I did get frustrated because I knew what I was doing, knew that I was simply repeating the same thing over and over, and thus getting nowhere. Who’s to say that if I just focused on the information instead of my feelings, I would have been able, like my subject, to retrieve the name.

An interesting topic came up this weekend with a few friends that relates to memory and how we view our own memories. One of my friends explains his memory as an office filled with filing cabinets, but the cabinets aren’t labeled, which is why he sometimes gets his memories mixed up and has a hard time retrieving certain ones. I thought that theory related to Augustine’s comparison between his memory and a great harbor. It also made me realize that I have never visualized my memory, or attempted to. Maybe this has something to do with my preference for auditory learning. Sounds and the way I hear things tend to make a greater impact then images. I have never thought of my memory as something else, or given it an image. I was wondering if this, giving memory an image, is common, and what types of images do we give?