Why do we recall some facts and not others? These event but not those?
How does human memory work?
What can we do to optimize memory in various situations and settings?
30-year primary teacher Clare Sealy has written a fascinating acting article in Education Next contrasting Episodic Memory with Semantic Memory and discussing the implications in educational settings.
The article begins:
When we look back on our own school days, our strongest memories are probably a mix of big occasions—field trips, plays, and sports days alongside more personal events tinged with strong emotion. Things that happened that were really funny or sad, or that made us feel excited, interested, exhilarated, or angry. We don’t tend to remember vividly, if at all, actually learning the substance of math or English or design technology. We might remember amusing anecdotes from lessons gone awry, or still bristle at past injustices — “but I wasn’t talking” — or have a vague impression of sitting in the science lab, with fleeting snippets of memories of this or that experiment. All of which leads to us making the entirely reasonable hypothesis that if we want students to remember what we teach them, then we need to make our lessons more like the spectacular one-off special events, or, at the very least, involve something specially selected because it’s exciting and possibly unusual. Memorable events, in this view, should form the template for creating memorable lessons.
As reasonable as this seems, this is a myth. It is a myth because human memory works in two different ways, both equally valid but one of which is much better at enabling us to transfer what we have learnt to new contexts. This transfer is an essential prerequisite for creativity and critical thinking.
The two forms of memory are known as episodic and semantic memory. Episodic memory is the memory of the ‘episodes’ of our life—our autobiographical memory. This takes no effort on our part, it simply happens. We don’t have to try consciously to remember what happened yesterday. Those memories just happen automatically. But there is a downside. Episodic memory is “easy come, easy go.” If you try to remember what you had for lunch yesterday, you will probably remember. If you try to remember what you had for lunch a year ago today—unless that happened to be some very significant date and some particularly noteworthy lunch—you will have no idea.
Semantic memory, on the other hand, involves much harder work. We have to expend effort to create semantic memories. This is the kind of memory we use when we consciously study something because we want to remember it. Unlike episodic memory, it does not just happen. The upside, however, is that the effort involved results in a long lasting memory.
Have you ever been in a course where you have really enjoyed listening to the speaker, found the subject matter interesting and the presenter amusing and engaging. Yet when you try to explain to someone the next day what the course was about, all that is really left is a vague impression of your emotions during the day, tinged with the odd snippet of content? You know the course was really good yet can’t really explain what it was actually about beyond the most general of assertions.
[Continue reading here.]
