As a student my memory is probably the most important thing I have – at least in terms of school. Several subjects like history and biology require a great deal of memorization, and even though my teachers remind me time and time again that understanding and memorizing are two different things, I have managed to get by for a long period of time with just memorizing endless pages of words out of a textbook.
I’ll be completely honest at the beginning of the year TOK definitely wasn’t at the top of my ‘most enjoyable list.’ But with most things I guess you never quite get into it unless it’s something that peaks your interest and for me there’s nothing more interesting than the human brain. This is why when we started talking about the topic of memory that I really started getting into this class.
Elias Lieberman once said that memory is all we own. And if there is in fact truth in this statement, then it comes as no surprise as to why I view my memory as something so valuable, for without it I truly am nothing. Because of this I unconsciously have created my own truth in that I seem to view memory as one of the biggest pathways to knowledge and without even realising it I have excluded other pathways so that my memory remains at the top of my list.
A prime example of this would be test taking. For our ecosystems unit, in biology, there was little understanding that needed to take place but rather a great deal of memorization about things like the phosphate or nitrogen cycle. And so when it came to taking the test I relied so heavily on my memory that when a question arose I allowed my memory to trump reason and common sense, which is why I got the question wrong. I had so much faith that my memory was 100% valid that I ignored my subconscious that was telling me that the answer was different from what I had remembered so clearly reading in my textbook.
Like any normal IB student I was devastated for my loss, but it also allowed me to realise some important things about my memory. Translated back to TOK class if there is anything that I have learned is that even though truth can sometimes be very difficult to uncover, there’s never only one knowledge pathway that should be used to get there.
One of the first things I learned about memory is that there is in fact two different types of memories – procedural and declarative. The difference between the two is that procedural memory is a sort of memory that sticks with you for life, an example of this would be learning to walk, once you know it it’s almost impossible to hard wire your brain to think otherwise. Declarative however would be where my test taking skills fall under, the facts that I memorized isn’t knowledge that I will retain for the rest of my life, in fact it is knowledge that has already left me. Therefore what I had known to be true- that my memory would serve me well in my attempt to seek knowledge wasn’t true at all, rather it lead me away from the truth.
In class we had done the activity in which we were asked to memorize a set of words and then write them all down without looking at them. Embarrassingly enough I was one of the only three kids in the entire class that had managed to write down window on my list even though it had not been there. But this serves as a great example as to why sometimes our memory isn’t as valid as we like to think it is.
Prior to this class all memory was the same to me, procedural and declarative, and because I had already formed that truth in my head I had assumed that it would remain the truth in all settings, but obviously that was proved incorrect. In the greater scheme of things this is in an example of how it is often difficult to replace truth that has been already established with new information. A reason for memory specifically may be because emotion and memory are very closely tied together and as we learned in class about hindsight bias we use our memories to interpret what is happening around us and ignore the events that don’t match up. Our emotions cause us to hold certain memories near and dear to our hearts and this emotional attachment causes us to form an umbrella over all memories and declare them all to be exact and true.