Cognition
Remember that day in the second when you memorized the multiplication tables? It might have seemed pointless at the time, but you've probably since discovered that knowing the answer to 7 × 7 can come in handy during life-or-death situations. You know...those life-or-death situations. The ones that require, uh, knowing the answer to 7 × 7.
Anyway.
How did that information go from memorized gibberish to meaningful knowledge?
Therein lies the mystery of cognition, or the study of the way the mind learns, remembers, and manipulates sensory information. (And it's 49, by the way, in case you missed class that day. We're just happy you're with us.)
How do we learn, store, and retrieve information? What is attention, and why is it paid? What makes some people more critical, more creative, better able to speak more languages, and more likely to remember things—while others struggle?
Study Break
"Sensation tells us a thing is.
Thinking tells us what it is this thing is.
Feeling tells us what this thing is to us." – Carl Gustav Jung
Memory
If you've ever seen the movie Memento, you know how important—and how fragile—memory can be. Spoiler alert: the main character loses the ability to form short-term memories and spends the rest of his life trying to get vengeance for a crime committed against him…without realizing that he's already killed the person responsible. Awkward.
Memory means the ability to obtain, keep, and use knowledge. One model of explaining memory, the three-box model or information-processing model, breaks it into three stages: Encoding, storage, and retrieval.
Encoding is the ability to get information from the environment and determine that it is meaningful. Ben is in school and the alphabet is presented. He says, "Hey, I might need this again."
Storage is the ability to keep that information for later use. Ben learns his ABC's. No one is asking for them yet, but he stores them in his brain.
Retrieval is the ability to access that information once it's been stored and use it. Ben comes home and Sophie asks him if he learned anything at school. He melodically shares the alphabet.
According to this model, sensory information is encoded into short-term, or working, memory. We manipulate it. If it seems really important and we use this info often, it gets stored as long-term memory. If we don't need it, we forget it. Once it's stored, we can retrieve it from long-term memory and use it again in working memory.
When Ben first learned his letters, A through Z was sensory information presented by the teacher. He manipulated it in his working memory, memorizing a song to help him and eventually it was encoded into his long-term memory. Now, even without thinking about the alphabet, he can retrieve that annoying little ditty from his long-term memory and recite it backwards and forwards.
Study Break
Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
And shared a conversation with the housefly in my bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions of the crickets,
And joined the crying of each falling dying flake of snow,
Once I spoke the language of the flowers. . . .
How did it go?
How did it go?
—Shel Silverstein, Forgotten Language
Systems of Memory
Sensory Memory
