Blog #9

Having memory is a privilege that we, as humans, take for granted. No one realizes how much a person uses their memory and doesn’t realize it. Without memory it would be difficult for a person to continues forward in life and increase their knowledge and ability to learn. Memory is everything that a human’s life is revolved around. Clive Wearing is an amazing and gifted human in the study of music. He has talent beyond any other however his lack of memory hurts his ability to go fat in life with what he knows. As I sit here I imagine being Mrs. Wearing, Clive’s wife, and I think to myself she handles Clive’s disability very well and doesn’t let that affect her love for him. She knows how long they have known each other and what has happened yet she plays along, while with him, like nothing has ever happened between them before. Now I see myself in her shoes and I can honestly say I could never do it, I couldn’t handle being married and having my partner forget everything in the past and for that matter my name. I would get upset with Clive when he states he didn’t write in his diary or that he doesn’t know what I am talking about. After this video I realized how fortunate I am to have the memory I do. I know I complain about forgetting little, unimportant events, but after seeing Clive those unimportant events became nothing because I can still remember my families’ names.
To me, memory was nothing like I thought it worked before. I learned in the “Human Memory Model” that human memory is described as a set of stores which are places to put information and a set of processes that act on the stores. It then went into detail about 3 stores being 1.) Sensory information store, 2.) The short term store and 3.) The long term store. They spoke of 3 processes; 1.) Encoding, 2.) Maintenance and 3.) Retrieval. I had no idea there were so many different places and steps to having a memory. I don’t see a difference in my memory from any other, I believe they all work the same what stops others from remembering certain things is the way our brain works and how it was developing. Most of the time I trust my memory and I normally have other information to back up what I have stated. However there are many points in time where I second guess myself and don’t agree 100% with what my memory is telling me.
In this section I learned the influences of emotions and stress hormones on memory. I found out that when we are excited or stressed emotion-triggered stress hormones make more glucose energy available to fuel brain activity, signaling the brain that something important has happened. I believe it was important because so many events take place in a person’s life that can change their emotions and affect their memory. However something can happen on a day to day basis and a person still has to remember those events as well. I can apply this to my life, especially being a teenager and emotional, because I have school work to memorize yet events occur that either make me happy or sad and remain in my memory for a larger period of time than any school work would.