Video: Remembering and Forgetting

From the video, I learned new things about memory of a human being. Here is the summary of what I learned:

1. There are roughly 100 trillions bits of information that are stored in a person’s memory.

2. How well a person remembers depends on
- concentration
- rehearsal
- psychological factors (motivation, wishes, and fears)
- physical state and biological condition

3. Ways to improve remembering:
- create links between old memory and new information
- discover meaning, order, and organization
- use peg-word (one is to bun; two is to shoe; three is to tree; and so on

4. Possible things that handicap learning:
- interference
- distraction

5. The memory’s information processing is made up with three parts: encoder, short-term memory, and long-term memory.

6. It is better to chunk information into groups for maintaining information in the short-term memory.

7. The long-term memory is like a library of data; when activating a certain memory in the network, other information linked to that memory will also be activated.

8. What a person remembers is determined by:
- who he or she is
- what already being remembered
- schemas (pre-conception)

9. During old age, the brain starts to shrink and neurons start to die. As the neurons die, the memories of those neurons are also lost, as shown in the Alzheimer’s disease.