Memory Case

Memory works in several ways, many early memories are implanted with an emotional tie, take for example a child's excitement and joy at Christmas high emotion is prone to bring back the memory in clear detail. Fear also has the same effect; if a scary event occurred the event can be recalled when similar circumstances reoccur. Santrock makes the statement in the book, Psychology Essentials that "memory is a complex interaction of brain function, emotion and individual circumstances" (Santrock, 2005). My most vivid memories have an emotional tie. For example I remember one of the most traumatic experiences for me was when we moved from my favorite home, I had my own room and all of my cousins to play with and was enjoying piano lessons. We moved to a two room mobile home and a room I shared with two brothers, I also had to give away my favorite dog. To this day, I remember it like it was yesterday. I believe an emotional and personal tie implant the memory more firmly into long term memory. Psychologists are studying the complexities of human memory and have discovered ways to help improve the way students learn. A good example would be to encode the information into long term memory instead of just "rehearsing", which is basically rote memorization. How we learn has a great deal to do with how we remember.

Remembering information involves three steps, encoding (getting information into memory), storage (retaining information), and retrieval, which is the ability to access the information (Santrock, 2005). This process occurs without a great deal of concentration on a daily basis for most people, but when there is more complex information to learn then an individual might try several different methods to remember the information, or store it in long term memory. There are three (must be the magic number) levels of encoding, shallow, intermediate and deep (Santrock, 2005). All three levels are pretty self explanatory, for example when driving down the road one might be aware of a certain billboard when driving by, but if the same billboard is seen every day the memory will become intermediate, and then deeper. The more exposure we have to something will facilitate better memory and recall. It is also mentioned in Psychology Essentials "encoding, storage, and retrieval make up a kind of cycle of memory, which is repeated often as we continue to see and think about new information" (Santrock, 2005).

Strategies can be used to improve memory in regards to information that one might want to retain and retrieve later. To retain something in short term memory, chunking which is a kind of grouping works well. This involves putting things into chunks (usually in a group of around 7) in order to remember them for longer than sensory memory allows (Santrock, 2005). Memorization is another form of storing things to memory, this is usually not very effective because it doesn't use any form of imagery, and this is referred to "rehearsal" (Santrock, 2005). I often use this method to remember something for work, for example I will repeat the name of a student that will be absent before I can write it down. This works well for remembering things for a short amount of time, so I can finish another task. For long term memory a more effective method is to use imagery (Santrock, 2005). For example I often have to remember parents' names for my job because I see them often. I will associate their names with the letter of the alphabet the name begins with sometimes even visualizing the letter and that always helps me remember their name better. (Sometimes though, no matter what method I might try to use there are parents names I don't ever remember.) When using imagery it helps