Although we tend to associate memory loss with old age, memory loss shows no mercy for youth. Research by Dr. R. Reed Hunt, Director of Adult Cognition and Memory Lab at UTSA, highlights the difference between normal forgetting and forgetting caused by degenerative forces brought on by old age or disease.
We often worry when we forget things, especially when we do it more often than what we think is normal. Hunt says that fear is overstated, likening a person’s memory to a butterfly, which are so fragile and yet are capable of 4,000-mile migrations. It is exactly that kind of appreciation that Hunt’s analogy is intended to give us for our own memory capacity.
In his article, “The Fragile Power of Memory,” Hunt cites data from the National Institute of Health that show that even “the most common form of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, occurs in only five percent of the American population between the ages of 60 and 74.” He acknowledges that the percentages increase with age, but points out that the numbers for other health problems simultaneously increase as well.
We often worry when we forget things, especially when we do it more often than what we think is normal. Hunt says that fear is overstated, likening a person’s memory to a butterfly, which are so fragile and yet are capable of 4,000-mile migrations. It is exactly that kind of appreciation that Hunt’s analogy is intended to give us for our own memory capacity.
Hunt says we worry about the tiny percentage of time that our memories fail us, and seem oblivious to a vast majority of tasks that our memories perform flawlessly. “If the bulk of your memory was inaccurate,” he said reassuringly, “you wouldn’t survive long, or if it was worse than everyone else’s, you’d be institutionalized.” Hunt goes on to explain, “as much as 90 percent of what we claim to have forgotten was never in (our) memory.” One of the main reasons we fail to imprint those images in our memory is that we are not paying attention to them in the first place. Our minds are busy thinking about something else. Inattention, not faulty circuits in our brain, is to blame for much of what we perceive as “flawed memory.”
Along with our tendency to occasionally forget things, other evidence of the fragility of memory that interests Hunt is the way we create what he calls “false memories.” For whatever reason, individuals tend to create inaccurate mental images of events, which naturally cause inaccuracies when we recall the details later. Hunt says that one reason for the false memories is that they are constructed from our own, often flawed inferences. False memories are often the result of misinterpretation. The reason we believe these false memories is because they are plausible. If we found them to be unrealistic, we would see them for what they were and purge them from our minds. “False memory,” Hunt says, “is more insidious than forgetting because you do not know that your memory is failing when you falsely remember something. The only way you can know of this memory failure is if someone convinces you that the memory is wrong.”
Another observation Hunt makes, that college students should know, is that cramming doesn’t work, at least not as well as other, less violent forms of learning. Hunt says that rote memorizing may work in the short-term, but it is very inefficient for long-term retention. If you’re reaching for a dictionary to look up the word rote I’ll save you a trip. “Rote memorization” is what graduate students do; cramming is what undergraduate students do, he argues, other than that there’s no difference. “If you’re trying to learn,” Hunt says, it’s better to learn something over time (rather than condense it). Processing the meaning of (information) gives you (better memory capabilities),” he adds. The extreme mental stress we feel when we cram may just be our brain telling us there’s a better way to learn. In any case, Dr. Hunt’s research gives important insight into an area of psychology-the fragile power of memory-that has broad implications. It can also mean the difference between success and failure for college students struggling to stay ahead.