Opinions: Forgive and forget

 by Lindsay Wood
 published on Friday, March 28, 2008

What if you won the lottery, but they paid you — unannounced to you — all at once in loose cash in the middle of Times Square? You wouldn't be very appreciative, would you?

They would start to give you handful after handful of cash, and you would try to stuff it in your pockets or under you arms, but after about the fourth bunch, you won't know what to do with it. The rest of the loot would pile up around your feet, and you would lose it to pedestrians or the wind. You would have preferred if they had given it you in a bag.

This is, of course, is a ridiculous scenario. If ever someone gives you a lot of money, you'd expect him or her to provide the proper satchel for carrying it.

So why is it that all our lives, teachers have given us globs and globs of facts and information without anything to put it in to make it easy to hold on to? I'm speaking, of course, about memory — memory is supposed the bag that allows us to hold on to information, but somehow, to the average person, it just never seems spacious enough.

On the other hand, some people have outstanding memories that retain like a sponge. An article in the current Discover magazine highlights a Russian journalist, S. V. Shereshevskii, whose memory was so good, he had a hard time forgetting useless information, and it nearly drove him mad; he essentially had to remember to forget.

That's nice for him, but what about the rest of us?

In this very article, titled "How to Win the World Memory Championships" (yes, there is such a competition), it says that most people with a good memory aren't geniuses but instead practice memorizing things. One event in the World Memory Championships is to memorize, in order, a deck of cards. Competitors train for hours a day, memorizing stacks of cards in order to be competitive. The record time for memorizing a deck of cards is held by a young British accountant Ben Pridmore at 26.28 seconds. That's a great party trick.

But after these memory champs where analyzed by scientists doing brain scans, it was discovered that it isn't that their brains are better the ours, simply their methods of memorizing are more effective.

If we learned in school from an early age how to expand our memories, we would be able to make a better use of all the facts that are poured over us by the many teachers that we have in our lives.

In ancient Rome and Greece, before printing books and posting on the Web was so easy, memorizing was essential. They practiced many different methods to be able to retain all the information that was passed on orally. However, just because we now have libraries full of books galore and the handy-dandy Internet, why give up that talent?

Having a good memory is something that needs to be practiced. In the words of author Vijai Sharma, "Memory works like a bank. You can get to it, only if you put it there. If you didn't deposit it, you can't collect it when you need it." Strangely, after more than a decade of school, the conscious act of storing things in your memory is something that is never addressed.

So, like winning a lottery and having nowhere to put the money, our public school system is like winning tons of useful information, but unfortunately, it is lost quickly after it is given away.

There are two upswings, however, to our frustrations brought about by bad memory. The first is that it is possible to improve, and you don't need to be any sort of genius to do it. Secondly, if you've always wanted to compete in a world championship but weren't born with a remarkable set of muscles, I think you now know your calling.

Lindsay is a conservation biology senior. E-mail her at: lindsay.wood@asu.edu.