Activity 5.1: Warm-up: Long-term Memory and Retrieval

Activity 5.1: Warm-up: Long-term Memory and Retrieval

I always enjoyed Fr. Guido Sarducci, because he could be funny without being crass. I loved his last line about opening a law school next to the Five Minute University, “You know, you got another minute?” Everything you need to remember about law is learned in one minute, which may be close to the truth since the law changes continuously. I think we learn even if we do not remember everything. We only retrieve what we need, so there may be files and files of information stocked away waiting for the moment when we decide to draw on those memories. It is like the tree in the woods saying, I believe that things happen even if there is no long lasting evidence. A tree falling in the woods makes a sound, even if there is no one there to hear it, just as we learn many things, even if we cannot remember them. I think we learn things on a continuum, some better than others. The stronger the learning process, the better the memory. I think we remember things vividly when they are associated with strong emotion.
 

When I was young, I watched a news video of an apartment building on fire in Chicago. There was a man on one of highest floors leaning out a corner window, black smoke billowing out around him. The fire truck ladder was too short to reach him. He was reaching out along the side of the building trying to find something to grab, to get out of that room, when finally, he just reached out with his hand and leg to try to cling to the brick … and he fell, right before my eyes. I sobbed, alone, in a house with ten family members. I remember that so vividly because I thought about the choice he had to make, to stay in the apartment and burn to death, or to fall to his probable death. This memory is associated with such fear and terror, such emotion, that I still panic when I think about it, and wish I had never seen it. In the book The Road (2007), the father talks about shielding his son from horrible images seen along the road as they travel to the ocean, because once images creep into our minds, they are there for good. I think he was talking about how we remember things we experience vividly when associated with emotion.