![]() The discovery that memory is all about connections has revolutionary implications for education. We also tend to remember the people and events that resonate emotionally, which is why forgetting an anniversary is such an offense: it is fair evidence that the date is not as important as the ones we do remember. Other recent studies show that imagining the future involves brain processes similar to, but distinct from, those involved in conjuring the past. The things we remember are the ones that experience teaches us will help us make predictions the newest work in our laboratory reveals how we make use of this predictive ability. And it is the connections that let us understand cause and effect, learn from our mistakes and anticipate the future. Indeed, recent research has shown that some people who lose their memory also lose the ability to connect things to each other in their mind. ![]() It is much more like a web of connections between people and things. For the very few people who have true photographic recall-eidetic memory, in the parlance of the field-it is more burden than blessing.įor most of us, memory is not like a video recording-or a notebook, a photograph, a hard drive or any of the other common storage devices to which it has been compared. It would not let you prioritize or create the links between events that give them meaning. In fact, a memory like that would snare mostly useless data and mix them willy-nilly with the information you really needed. How handy would that be? Finding your car keys would simply be a matter of zipping back to the last time you had them and hitting “play.” You would never miss an appointment or forget to pay a bill. Many people wish their memory worked like a video recording.
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