MEMORY and Memories

Memory plays an invaluable part in learning foreign languages as it is one of the most important human faculties. It can be defined as the process in which information is coded, stored and retrieved.
Memory, however, is more than just the ability to recall and we know very little about how the mind remembers things and how and why it forgets other things.

          THE VARIETIES OF MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES

Memory can be divided into several different types:

Episodic memory: The memory for past episodes and events in one´s life.

Factual memory: The memory for facts, such as that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492.

Semantic memory: The memory for meaning: the average person remembers several hundred thousand words and meanings.

Iconic memory: the memory for visual information as when you are watching a new film.

Echoic memory: the memory for sounds, the one which stores your auditory information

Topographic memory: the ability to orient yourself in space

Sensory memory: we can even remember the smell of some tasty dish, or thousands of different people´s faces.

Photographic memory:visual memory

Instinctive memory: the newborn baby "remembers" to suck at its mother´s breast.

Collective memory: According to Carl Jung we share collective race memories as archetypal symbols.

Procedural or skills memory: Our skills involve memory: from driving a car to walking..

Haptic memory: a database for touch stimuli

Past-life memory:Some people appear to be able to "remember" events from before their birth.

Declarative memory, etc..

There is hardly a moment in our lives when memory is not playing a crucial role, and the more we understand how it functions, the more we can help ourselves at work, at home, in play and in study.

From The Brain Book by Peter Russell 

                               Our  Cultural memory 

                     Our law of historical memory
                Selective memory 

                                Curating memory

·         Globalised memory

·         Marginalised memories

·         Memory and affect

·         Memory and anti-colonial struggle

·         Memory and class

·         Memory as gender/sexual politics

·         New technologies and memory

·         Racialised memory

·         Religion and cultural memory

·         Space, place and memory

·         Theoretical approaches to cultural and collective memory

 

                                 A MEMORY EXPERIMENT

Read through the following list of words just once. Do not study them, just read each to yourselves in 60 seconds:

water, life, dog, line, home, mouse

field, balls,rabbit, apple,sheep, head

bone, year, goat,Maharishi, hill, owl

oar, donkey, shape,crop, wind, pig

tool, cow, door, stone, flower, cat.

Now, find yourselves a pencil or a pen and write as many of the words as you can remember, in whatever order they come to you.

You are unlikely to have recalled the whole list of 30 words. You are more likely to have recalled: water, life, flower and cat than year and wind. The increased probability of recalling the first two or three items is called the primacy effect; and that of recalling the last few items is called the recency effect. The Von Restorff effect is the tendency to remember outstanding elements in a list: in our list above Maharishi. You might have also recalled the two words positioned on either side of Maharishi...

from Fast Forward 3 Classbook by Marion Geddes O.U.P.

Share your mnemonics ability. Guess what the following will refer to: CORMUNOAPONVI,HOMES; FANBOY,etc.. 

From the seven sins of memory by Daniel Schacter I´ve learned they are:The sin of transience,of absent-mindedness,of blocking,of misattribution, of suggestibility,of bias and of persistence...(They could be virtues after all to keep ourselves alive)