Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych
Exam Review. In this video and the next
video, we're going to look at a series of
memory failures and these are often
referred to as the seven sins of memory
by researcher Daniel Schacter. Now you
might not be familiar with the names of
all of these memory failures at the
moment but chances are you've already
experienced all of these failures at
some point. So we'll start with a basic
failure that you've certainly
experienced and this is the idea that
you forget things over time. This
is referred to as transience.
This is a failure to retrieve a memory
simply due to the passage of time.
So we can say it's a retrieval
failure. You encode the memory
correctly and you store it but over some
period of time it fades away so we have
a retrieval failure due to time.
One of the first researchers to look
into this in a systematic way was a guy
named Hermann Ebbinghaus, he was a
German researcher and we'll talk about
him more in a future video but one of
the things that Ebbinghaus did is he
measured his ability to recall things
over time and he created what he called
a forgetting curve. You've probably
seen this before, the idea of the
forgetting curve is that over time,
the amount we can remember of
the information that we studied or
learned sort of fades very quickly
and then it sort of flattens out like
this. You know within about an hour
after sitting through a lecture
you've forgotten most of the lecture. You
might still remember a little bit, and
overtime you remember a little bit less
and a little bit less. The important
lesson from the forgetting curve is that
each time you review that information, so
if you were to re-study that
information, you sort of bring the curve
back up and it starts falling over time
and then hopefully you study
again and then it starts falling and you
study again and you study again and what
you can do over time is sort of
flatten it out where you actually
are able to maintain
a lot of that memory over time. So as
you can see the best way to do that is
to review information repeatedly.
Cramming for one night, within a
few hours, you've probably forgotten most
of that. Whereas if you spread out that
review over time then you have a better
chance of remembering more of it.
That's something we'll talk about in a
future video when I talk about some
memory tips to improve your ability to
remember things. Ok, so this is the idea
of transience. The next error that we'll
look at is absentmindedness. You've
certainly experienced this before, for
instance if you've ever left an umbrella
inside a taxi or or in a restaurant or
something. Usually what happens is
you forget the object and then you
remember later. So it's not really that
the memory is gone. It's not so much
a failure that you've lost the memory
it's a failure that you didn't remember
the memory at the right time. You didn't
bring it to mind at the appropriate time
and in this way we can think of
absentmindedness as really being a
failure of attention rather than a
memory failure. So you have the memory,
you remember that you
brought your phone with you, say, and you
set it down and then as you're leaving
you don't remember to bring to mind that
your phone is not with you or it's not in
your bag or something and so later
when you're already home you
suddenly remember "oh I left my phone at
my friend's house" or something. So you
can think of it as an attention failure.
It's a failure to direct your
attention to the memory at the
appropriate time. Now this brings us to a
strategy for reducing absent-mindedness.
This refers to something called
prospective memory.
Prospective refers to the future so
the idea of prospective memory is really
memory for the future, which is kind of a
weird idea, right? Remembering things that
haven't happened yet. So this is
your future memory. So what do I mean by
that? Well let's say you have something
that you have to bring with you tomorrow.
You have a meeting or you have to bring
something to class, a project that
you've been working on, and it's really
important that you bring this with you
tomorrow morning when you leave. Now if
you use your prospective memory you
might realize "hey you know what this is
the type of thing I might forget in the
morning. I might wake up late
I'm in a rush, and I might end
up leaving the project at
home and that would be terrible". So what
you do is you plan for your future
ability to remember it and the way that
you might do that is, let's say it's a
bag you have to bring with you, before
you go to bed that night, you might put
the bag in front of the front door.
Now this will ensure that your
attention gets directed to the memory as
you're leaving. So it will make it pretty much
impossible for you to forget it, right?
Because you've taken care of this
attention failure, you've planned for the
future and created a way to remind your
memory that "okay this is the thing I
need to bring with me today". So that's
something you can keep mind if you have
a problem where you are continually absent minded
and you're leaving things in places and
forgetting to bring things with you, you
can try to use your prospective memory
and plan for future memory failures that
haven't happened yet but are foreseeable
to happen. Ok, so that's absent
mindedness and the last one that we'll look
at in this video and then the next video
we'll continue, is called blocking.
Blocking refers to the idea that we have
a memory, we've encoded it properly, we've
stored it over time, we're just not able
to retrieve it at the moment.
It's a temporary inability to
retrieve a memory.
You've probably experienced this
and the most common way that this
blocking occurs in is in what's called
the tip of the tongue phenomenon.
This is the frustrating condition where
you have the memory, you know you have
the memory, and yet you can't seem to
access it when you want to. You're like
it's right on the tip of your tongue as
you say. So what causes this to
happen? Well generally this happens with
memories that we have that we don't
access very frequently. We don't retrieve
them very often and so it might take a
little effort to find how to sort of
pull that memory out from our long-term
memory. So it usually happens with
infrequently accessed memories. So for
instance, if I wanted to trigger a tip of
the tongue experience I would ask you a
question that you probably know the
answer to but you probably haven't
thought about in a very long time. So for
instance, I might ask you about some sort
of obscure words like if you have to
think about a word for a person who
makes maps. You probably know this
word, probably haven't thought of it in a
while. Or the name for this rock,
a volcanic rock with a hard glassy surface.
So if you're experiencing this tip of
the tongue phenomenon it's because you know
these words, cartographer and obsidian,
but when's the last time you accessed
that memory? It's probably been a while.
It's an infrequently accessed memory, this
was more likely to cause this. Now it can
also happen for other things, it's not
just for words. This could happen when
you see a former classmate that you
haven't seen in 10 years or longer and
you recognize their face, you know that
you know the person, you know that their
name is somewhere in your memory, you
can't seem to access it right at this
moment. This can lead to an
embarrassing social situation but
hopefully this doesn't happen too
frequently to you. Ok, so in the next
video we'll look at some other memory
failures but for now these are our first
three; transience, absent-mindedness, and
blocking. I hope you found this helpful, if
so, please like the video and subscribe
to the channel for more. Thanks for
watching!