Remembering and Forgetting

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING Do you remember your first day in the school? On what day did you go to the market last week? Can you name your friends? In our everyday life almost all activities in one or the other way deal with memory. Loss of memory means loss of one's self. Learning will make no sense if it is not retained by the person. It is only through the capacity of memory that we are able to relate to different events, experiences, conditions, people and objects. Also, we use the understanding thus developed in different contexts and on different occasions. Thus, memory makes it possible to operate beyond the constraints of time and place. A child learns something in class and uses it in the market or at home or some other place. Memory establishes links across diverse experiences. It's a great mental capacity — almost magical. It is needed in developing social relationships, mastering cognitive competencies (mental capacities) and solving various problems. There are also occasions when our memory fails and we forget a name, a formula or fail to recognize a person. The study of memory is one of the oldest fields of research in psychology. Psychologists have been studying various aspects of memory. In this lesson we will study how our memory works, the factors which increase or decrease our memory capacity, and what can be done to improve memory.