Memory

     When it comes to talking about memory, we can’t help but associate it with couple aspects. What is the biological side of memory? How does it affect our learning ability and how are past memories retrieved? There are a bunch of researches studying about “memory’’, a function on which we heavily relies to live. Without memory, we will live aimlessly and insignificantly. Memory is basic equipment for human beings to lead regular life. We survive daily lives by following schedules memorized in our brains. What’s more, we depend on procedural memory to operate physical skills such as cooking and driving, without any conscious effort to recall how to do it.     
     As everyone knows, some people are excellent in academic field, while some are not. There are differences between genius, ordinary people, and fool, resulting from the capacity of working memory. The working memory capacity is one of the elements which composed of IQ. It has a positive relationship with reading comprehension.     

     Based on document, it is said that emotion has a lot to do with affecting memory and thinking.“Subjects exhibited mood-state-dependent memory in recall of word lists, personal experiences recorded in a daily diary, and childhood experiences.” (Bower, 1981, pg129) Those experiences are affectively congruent with the mood which we are in when we recall. “Emotion powerfully influenced such cognitive processes as free associations, imaginative fantasies, social perceptions, and snap judgments about others' personalities.” For example, we tend to recall the shortback of a person when we are mad at him/her, while we always think of the advantage of him/her when we are happy. The reason why emotion has a lot to do with memory lies in its ability to influence our option of scenes when we recall something. A group of students were asked to stay in a lab to have a test about affection of emotion toward memory. Some of them were designated to watch a sad moviw while others were designated to watch a comedy. The goal of the experiment is to see how sadness and happinese effect a person on choosing what to remember in mind. Subjects who read statements such as"Things have been going badly for me lately" and "I'm feeling very lonely, isolated, and depressed." left the lab with a image that they were feeling this way. On the contrary, those who heard laugh in the comedy walked out the lab with rememberence that they were happy. In conclusion, we pick up certain scenes from past events as so-called memory in accordance with current emotion.          

     Besides emotion, age is another factor to affect memory. The difference is, emotion effects mainly on retrospective memory while age effects more on prospective memory. As humankinds get older, age-related memory impairments get greater, which prevents us from remembering to do something we already planned.(Smith, G., Del Sala, S., Logie, R. H., & Maylor, E. A. , 2000, pg871)       

     From some research papers, I learned that memory is an inborn ability which can be strengthened or be weekened by some postnatal factors. Memory gives us an ability to survive in daily lives, while it also misleads us to recall past events wrongly. Knowing the biological side and some hypotheses about memory, I will further find ways to improve it.