Memory and Forgetting Notes

Factors Related to Remembering

  • Biological Factors:
    • Evolutionary adaptiveness of memory.
    • Brain regions involved in sensory, working, and long-term memory.
    • Changes in brain activity during encoding and retrieval.
    • Stress hormones and biological states (e.g., drug-induced) that affect memory.
  • Psychological Factors:
    • Memory codes (visual, phonological, semantic, motor).
    • Working memory, maintenance and elaborative rehearsal.
    • Schemas and expertise.
    • Memory as a network of associations.
    • Emotional arousal at the time of the event; mood at the time of retrieval.
  • Environmental Factors:
    • Amount and rate of information.
    • Order of information.
    • Stimulus characteristics (e.g., distinctiveness, pleasant/unpleasant events).
    • Retrieval cues and context-dependent memory.

Forgetting

  • Definition: The loss, permanent or temporary, of the ability to recall or recognize something learned earlier.
  • Causes:
    • Lack of attention.
    • Information does not reach STM from the sensory register.
    • Inadequate encoding and rehearsal.
    • Information not transferred from STM to LTM.

Types of Forgetting

  • Repressive Erasure:
    • Definition: Totalitarian makeovers of history (e.g., after the Norman Conquest or in Futurism).
    • Application: Used to deny a historical rupture or bring about a historical break.
    • Relevance: Most brutal in totalitarian regimes.
  • Prescriptive Forgetting:
    • Definition: Precipitated by an act of state.
    • Purpose: In the interests of all parties to the previous dispute.
    • Acknowledgment: Can be acknowledged publicly.
  • Forgetting as Constitutive:
    • Definition: Formation of a new identity (e.g., narratives of modernity as the transformation of feudalism by capitalism).
    • Associated effect: Emancipation of individuals.
    • Consideration: Suggests doubts about the conviction that forgetting involves a loss.
  • Structural Amnesia:
    • Definition: Remembering only socially important links in one's pedigree.
  • Forgetting as Annulment:
    • Definition: Flows from a surfeit of information (e.g., growth of archives and computers).
    • Contrast: Differs from structural amnesia, which results from a deficit of information.
  • Forgetting as Planned Obsolescence:
    • Definition: Built into the capitalist system of consumption (e.g., the ever-shortening "product life cycle").
    • Application: Capitalists turned attention from the production of goods to the production of services due to limits to the turnover time of material goods.
  • Forgetting as Humiliated Silence:
    • Definition: Common in the case of defeated nations in war.
    • Distinction: Not the primary or defining characteristic of this type of forgetting.
    • Agent: Not solely, and may in large part be not at all, a matter of overt activity on the part of a state apparatus.

Agents of Forgetting

  • Types 1 and 2 (Repressive Erasure and Prescriptive Forgetting):
    • Agents: States, governments, ruling parties, gallery's curators as bearers of western culture or a national or regional inflection of it.
  • Types 3 and 4 (Forgetting as Constitutive and Structural Amnesia):
    • Agents: Individuals, couples, families, or kin groups.
  • Type 5 (Forgetting as Annulment):
    • Agents: Individuals and groups of various sizes (e.g., families and large corporations) and societies and cultures as a whole.
  • Type 6 (Forgetting as Planned Obsolescence):
    • Agents: Members of an entire system of economic production.
  • Type 7 (Forgetting as Humiliated Silence):
    • Agents: Not necessarily, but most commonly civil society.