What Is Forgetfulness And Why Do We Forget Important Things?
What did you have for dinner last night? When was the last time you cried? What did you do on the morning of April 15, 2008? How did you celebrate your third birthday? Surely you have not been able to answer all these questions. What is the reason for this type of forgetfulness?
Let’s see what the neuropsychological mechanisms are that explain this phenomenon.
Memories are not permanent, as they are maintained in a continually changing tissue in which some neurons die and certain connections change or weaken. This means not only that we can lose the accessibility of the stored information, but also its availability in our cognitive system.
What difference exists between both concepts? According to Endel Tulving, accessibility refers to the ease with which a stored memory can be retrieved at a given time, while availability refers to the presence or absence of a trace in the memory store.
Thus, an experience may appear to be lost in its entirety just because an adequate retrieval cue to evoke the memory has not been presented. This would mean an inaccessibility of the information at the time of recovery, but not necessarily a loss of availability, so it could be recovered at another time.
Types of forgetting
Based on the studies carried out on memory, two types of forgetting are distinguished: intentional forgetting and incidental forgetting The former undertakes processes or behaviors that intentionally decrease accessibility for some purpose, while the latter occurs without the intention of forgetting. This article will focus on the latter, showing some factors that encourage and diminish it.
Now: what factors influence when we simply forget some relevant information?
1. Passage of time
The forgetting curve (described by Ebbinghaus), shows a logarithmic decrease in memory retention as a function of time elapsed (known as footprint decay). That is, as time passes we remember less information.
However, it is impossible to control factors such as the review of memories or the storage of new experiences, which generates interference, making it difficult to empirically demonstrate the effect of time per se.
Other factors to consider are context fluctuations and interference.
2. Context fluctuations
When the incidental retrieval context does not correspond to the context present during encoding, forgetting is more likely. With the passage of time, contextual changes are, in general, greater, since the world changes and so do we. An example is the case of childhood amnesia, which refers to the difficulty that most people have in remembering the first years of life.
One possible cause is that children experience things very differently from the adults they become; things seem relatively bigger in childhood. (However, the maturation process they are in must be taken into account, since they have not yet developed the brain like an adult).
3. Interference
Interference refers to the difficulty of retrieving similar stored traces. We are able to remember experiences that are unique and easily distinguishable more easily and for a longer period of time. Thus, sticking to routines makes life less memorable
The interference becomes greater when the cue that allowed access to the object memory trace is associated with additional memories, because several items compete with the goal of accessing consciousness (competition assumption). That is, if we store information similar to the consolidated information, it is more difficult to access it. For example, the memory of a summer. We will remember more easily the year we visited our neighbor’s town (a unique experience) than the summer we went to our own, since in the second case, when we go every year, it will be difficult for us to discern what specifically happened in each one.
When part of a set of items is presented, the ability to remember the remaining items in the group is weakened.
This is due to exposure to one or more competing items, which aggravates the problems we encounter in recovering a certain objective memory. The logic, following the interference situation described above, is the following: if the presentation of some items in the set strengthens the association of those items with the key, the strengthened items will produce greater competition during the recovery of the items not presented and will impair the memory.
For example, when we do not remember a word (we have it “on the tip of our tongue”) it is not beneficial for our acquaintances to offer us an extensive list of terms since they will promote their accessibility, but not that of the word in question. .
5. Recovery
A paradoxical characteristic of human memory is that the very act of remembering causes forgetting. The intentional recovery of an experience produces an effect on memory.
If memories are recalled periodically, their resistance to forgetting increases However, we must be cautious as to what is being recovered, because if we recover the experience on several occasions, we may be evoking the memory of what we have previously recovered (with its own context and details), and not the original situation.
This means that the more often we retrieve an experience, the more retrieval events will exist in our memory. As long as the information retrieved becomes increasingly accurate and complete, the process will improve recall. However, if memories are incomplete or inaccurate (due to interference during attempts to reconstruct the event), what we remember may not be what originally happened.
For example, by selectively reviewing only some topics that are included for an exam (due to lack of time), the material not reviewed will be disadvantaged, especially if it is related to the material reviewed.
What factors stop incidental forgetting?
Jost’s Law says that if two memories are equally strong at a given time, the older one will be more durable and will be forgotten more slowly. Thus, it is widely accepted that, in principle, new strokes are more vulnerable until they are gradually recorded in memory through the consolidation process.
Types of consolidation
There are two types of consolidation: synaptic consolidation and systematic consolidation The first shows that the imprint of experience needs time to consolidate (hours/days…) because it requires structural changes in the synaptic connections between neurons. In this way, until they have occurred, the memory is vulnerable.
The second maintains that the hippocampus is necessary for memory storage and subsequent retrieval (since it constantly reactivates the brain areas involved in the initial experience), but its contribution decreases over time until the moment in which the cortex finally itself is capable of recovering the information. Until the memory can be independent of the hippocampus, it is more vulnerable to forgetting.
