Decay Of Memory Essay

The human memory is an inaccurate storage of our lives, memories are often revised, cut out, or replaced. Jim’s experience with incorrectly recalling the day his parents won the lottery can be due to many different ways the brain forgets information. Jim may know that his parents won the lottery but not have enough paid attention to the specific details of the day. This occurs often with exciting events, you focus so much on what is happening we do not remember particular details. This improper memory storage is called encoding failure. Encoding is the brain’s ability to store information. The day has been brought up so much but he never encoded the specifics of the day because he was so shocked about his parents winning the lottery. Some memories we do encode very well when they happen but over time the memory fades, this is called storage decay. A memory was there but was eventually discarded; the physical trace of them deteriorated. This is common in what we learn in school as children; it is much harder to recall Latin vocabulary terms when you have been out of the class for an extended period of time. The information is no longer useful, and rehearsal of them ceases and the memory is …show more content…
And when trying to remember old events we will add details that are similar to what really happened, but not quite on the mark, this is called discerning truth and false memories. Jim accurately remembered his parents winning the lottery, the small detail are not as important so he did not remember them correctly. He did though have the gist of the day down, he knew they won, and that is the important memory. This is common having to pick words out of a list that were previously shown to you. People to pick out words similar to the ones shown, such as picking warmth when they were actually only shown fire, heat, and burn. The other word is similar and was misidentified as being in the provided