The brain, with its 100 billion neurons, allows us to do amazing things, like learn multiple languages, or create things that send people into outer space. However, despite this amazing power, we usually cannot remember where we left our keys, we forget why we went to the grocery store, and it is difficult for us to recall personal events. This apparent contradiction in functionality opens up the question of why we forget some things but remember others. Or, more importantly, what causes forgetfulness?
In an article recently published in the journal Psychological Science, Tal Sade and colleagues at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto looked at the lengthy debate in the world of memory science; do we forget things due to breakup or interference?
Decay. Decay advocates believe that our memories slowly fade due to the passage of time during which they were not accessed. You can imagine it just like messages written in the sand, each ocean wave that approaches the shore makes the writing less legible until eventually it disappears completely. The sand is the web of brain cells that form the memory in the brain, and the ocean waves represent the time that passes.
Intervention. Intervention theory is often equated with decay. It is believed that "memories become less accessible due to the interference of information obtained before or after the formation of the main memories." In our example of a beach, this means that instead of waves slowly eating away at the message, the child comes and writes on it. This makes the message difficult, if not impossible, to read. The child in this example represents a new experience, and the message he writes is the information left in the brain by this experience. This leads to oblivion, as experience essentially overwrites the original memory. This is a process that can also lead to false memories.
What Sadeh and her Canadian colleagues help illustrate is that these theories should not be in competition with each other. Decay and interference are very important in understanding oblivion. According to their research, our memory depends on the nature of the original memory. The researchers found support for their theory of forgetting by conducting an experiment with 272 students at the University of Toronto. Here, participants were randomly assigned to an experimental setting that varied in terms of how much time elapsed between learning and memorizing a word, and the degree to which memory of that word blended with things they had to do in between. learning and memorization.
According to the authors, they found support for the idea that memory can take the form of two different representations in the brain; awareness or recollection. “Awareness” is a memory process that allows us to remember something, but without specific details. This is an idea where we “know” that something has happened, although we cannot remember the original context. It's like when you feel like you recognize the face, that the guy looks like he is familiar, but you can't remember how you know the person. In contrast, if you have a “memory” of something, you also remember the context of the memory. In the process, you get to know the guy and you remember his name or other defining details.
Our Canadian research team suggests that these two types of memory representations act differently, and look differently in the brain. Each is thought to be dependent on a key part of the brain, called the hippocampus, in different ways, which is very important for creating memories; recollection-based memories maintained by the hippocampus are relatively resistant to interference. Decay should be the main source of their forgetting. In contrast, awareness-based memories are sensitive to interference.
The combination of both processes of forgetting means that any message is unlikely to ever remain in memory exactly as you originally wrote it.
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