Activity 5.1

Though I believe learning and memory are related I do not believe they depend on each other.

In thinking about all things I have learned, at least in my college years, I often think about a course I took in Entomology. Entomology is the subject my husband is studying and as I was a biology minor in undergraduate college I decided to take a course in it. As part of the course we had to memorize all the major insect orders and be able to spot insects that were part of each order. After two years of graduate school and filling my brain up with school psychology when conversing with my husband or his friends from the Entomology department I started to notice I couldn't verbally call up insect orders with the confidence I had once been able to. In particular I struggled with insects I rarely see on a daily occurrence; I could verbally recall what order a firefly belonged to but I could no longer remember what order a thrip belonged to. The orders of insects that I regularly saw and therefore thought of were still easily recalled but the ones I had not practiced seemed to have vanished. However, when I discussed the orders with my husband it was like for each order a little light was turning on. "Ah yes! Praying mantises are members of the order Mantodea!" Instead of having to recode the information into my brain I just had to dust it off a little. I tried finding a quote from James (1983) that I felt was related to this but was unable to locate it. Since I was unable to find the excerpt, I will instead summarize the gist. In the quote James states that a student who says they know an answer but can't exactly say what it is is different than a student who does not know at all. I believe this speaks to the difference of being able to verbally recall something versus knowing knowledge is floating around somewhere in your brain and you just can't say what it is.

I believe we remember vividly what we want to forget because of something called rumination. Unlike the knowledge I had gained from the Entomology course, things we wish to forget we repeatedly call up in our memory and think about, i.e. we ruminate about them. For example, say I had just taken an exam and thought I had bombed it. Though I want to move on and think about other things I keep bringing up questions in my head, thinking about if I answered them correctly, questioning whether I filled out all the pages, or looking up answers in my book. Instead of moving on and thinking about something else I keep bringing up the memories of the test, in short reliving it over and over again.