Haley's Psych Thoughts

Our memory is a very important aspect of our lives that controls everything we do. Unfortunately, our memory isn’t like a tape recorder that picks up every detail. Our certainty of what we remember isn’t as reliable as we wish it was due to many factors. These factors are known as “The Seven Sins of Memory” which involve forgetting, distortions, and intrusive recollections. The three that involve forgetting are known as transience, absent-mindedness, and blocking; the three that involve distortions of memories are misattribution, suggestibility, and bias; lastly, the one sin that involves intrusive recollections and the one I will be discussing in more depth is persistence. Persistence is having a memory that keeps reappearing that you’d rather forget. Persistence can either be small and insignificant or it can have a lasting and potentially harmful effect on someone. Has anyone had a song stuck in their head that started off as a catchy, but now it’s irritating and you can’t stop h...

Our memory is a huge important part to our daily lives. From remembering the notes you learned in your biology class to remembering how to walk, our memory controls what, how, and why we are doing something. Some memories don’t last for very long which is why our memory isn’t like a video camera that captures every detail of the event; for example, the color of your friend’s shirt. Certain memories can go from our short-term memory to our long-term memory storage. However, there are different explanations (theories) to how we process information and store it away to remember later. The two theories are based around two kinds of psychology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology. According to the neuroscience theory of memory, there are three parts that help move the information we encode to our long-term storage. The first part is the thalamus which encodes the senses we perceive (what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell) and then moves that information to the appropriate lobe. Next, t...