Theory of Knowledge: Memory

• The seven sins of memory

  Despite memory's obvious benefits, it can also let us down, said Daniel Schacter, PhD, longtime memory researcher and chair of Harvard University's psychology department
• Time to forget

  Memories are not preserved behind air locks in some squishy cellular vault. Rather they resemble clouds swirling in the currents. Change the conditions in which you remember, and the reminiscence twists accordingly
• Confirmation Bias

  Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true
• Rationalism vs Empiricism

  The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge
• Explicit and Implicit Memory: Intuition Training Basics

  We can't change biological memory, but the evolutionary psychologists who imply therefore that the behaviors that result from it are "hardwired" are wrong, because cultural and personal memory shapes intuition too
• Intuition, Memory Help Us Keep Track of Numbers

  Scientists think our ability to remember numbers may to have to do with an innate “numbers sense,” as well as simple memorization.
• You Must Remember This: Forgetting Has Its Benefits

  Neuroscientists say forgetting is crucial to the efficient functioning of the mind, to learning, adapting and recalling more significant things.
• Zapping sleepers' brains boosts memory

  A small new study showed that half an hour of this brain stimulation improved students' performance at a verbal memory task by about 8%. The approach enhances memory by creating a form of electrical current in the brain seen in deep sleep, the researchers suggest.
• Memory: From sense to storage

  Remembering the past is an integral part of human existence. Without a good memory, you would not be able to drive to work, hold a meaningful conversation with your children, read a book, or prepare a meal.
  Note: You need to use the school login to read the full article
• 4 Things Most People Get Wrong About Memory

  Human memory has been shown again and again to be far from perfect. We overlook big things, forget details, conflate events. One famous experiment even demonstrated that many people asked to watch a video of people playing basketball failed to notice a person wearing a gorilla suit walk right through the middle of the scene.
  So why does eyewitness testimony continue to hold water in courtrooms?

Can we know things which are beyond our personal present experience? Is eyewitness testimony a reliable source of evidence? Can our beliefs contaminate our memory?

Many discussions of knowledge tend to focus on how beliefs and knowledge are formed rather than on how they are remembered by the individual. However, most of the knowledge that individuals have is in the form of memory and therefore how we retain information and how past events and experiences are reconstructed is an important aspect of how personal knowledge is formed.

Memory, and particularly habit, has a strong link to procedural knowledge and remembering how to perform actions. In contrast to perception, memory refers to things which are not currently happening. And in contrast to imagination, memory refers to things which we believe really happened. Some would argue that memory is not itself a source of knowledge, but instead is a process which we use to recall knowledge gained in the past. However, although memory refers to knowledge gained in the past, it can be argued that even new knowledge is dependent on and influenced by memory. For example, how we interpret new situations can be heavily influenced by experience and previous events. In this way, apart from being a “storage unit” for existing knowledge, memory can also be a mechanism that allows us to process new and unique situations.

The importance of memory can be highlighted by imagining the challenges that would be presented by losing our memory. Because so much of our personal knowledge is in the form of memory, issues surrounding the reliability of memory are also crucial. Memory retrieval is often regarded as unreliable, for example, because it is seen to be subjective or heavily influenced by emotion. However, we rely on our memory every day and because many of our memories seem to be reliable, this gives us confidence that our other memories are reliable.

from the IB 2015 Study Guide

'Memory is deceptive because it is coloured by today’s events'  Albert Einstein 

'Memory is man’s greatest friend and worst enemy'  Gilbert Parker 

'It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.'  Barbara Kingsolver 

'No memory is ever alone; it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.' Louis L'Amour

'We can invent only with memory' Alphonse Karr

'Language is memory and metaphor'. Storm Jameson