Activity 5.3: Find and Post a Video on Memory

Activity 5.3: Find and Post a Video on Memory


The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory

Daniel Kahneman discusses three cognitive traps that keep people from understanding what it means to be happy. The first is that happiness is too vague, and that terms, well-being or life satisfaction are better suited to his contention. A second is that we distort the importance of any circumstance that affects well-being. A third trap is that there is a difference between happiness in your life (experience) and happiness about your life (memory). What is interesting is how he distinguishes between our two selves. Our experiencing self, lives in the present, and our remembering self, “maintains the story of our life,” both selves confusing what we identify as happiness. What we keep, or remember from our experiences are stories of our memories. Kahneman determined that time has little effect on our stories, whereas, endings do. We can have a great experience that ends badly, and recall the experience as negative, or a bad experience with a fantastic ending, thus, a positive memory. The ideas in the power point (slide #41) that the accuracy of long-term memory may be effected by; “memory reconstruction, memory invention, repressed (recovered) memory, fable (created) memory, autobiographical memory, or traumatic memories” support this cognitive trap theory.

Activity 4.5: Short-Term Memory

Activity 4.5: Short-Term Memory

Some of these items were frustrating and made me wonder if I am just getting old and forgetful, but I realized that remembering random objects, words, or numbers, is more difficult than items with some patterns, associations or meaning. The list I had for item #14, Meaningfulness in recall had no meaning, so I remembered zero names, but if I had received the other list, it would have been easy since it had meaning, as in the case of Bill Clinton losing his job, which is a cinch to remember.  I had the most trouble with numbers and random shape/color patterns. I was good at item # 11, Melody recall (I am a musician), item #2, Paired word recall, and #13, Serial position effect, although I put the names in different locations.

As far as teaching goes, if we want our students to remember a series of items, we need to help them develop patterns, associations and /or meanings for those items. When I go to the store without a list, I create a mnemonic device for the items I need, such as BEAM for bread, eggs, apples, and milk.