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PSYCHOLOGY IN EVERYDAY LIFE
in this chapter. Molaison suffered from to do something, but they could not con-
anterograde amnesia — he could remem- sciously recall learning their new skill.
ber his past, but he could not form new Such sad case studies confirm that we
conscious memories. (Those who cannot have two distinct memory systems, con-
remember their past — the old informa- trolled by different parts of the brain.
tion stored in long- term memory — suffer For most of us, forgetting is a less
from retrograde amnesia.) Neurologist drastic process. Let’s consider some of
Oliver Sacks described another patient, the reasons we forget. Lightspring/Shutterstock
Jimmie, who was stuck in 1945, the year
of his brain injury. When Jimmie gave his For a helpful tutorial animation
age as 19, Sacks set a mirror before him: about this type of research method, see the Video:
“Look in the mirror and tell me what you Case Studies. Ebbinghaus, also studied how long mem-
see. Is that a 19-year- old looking out from ories last. After learning his lists of non-
the mirror?” (Sacks, 1985, pp. 26–27). ENCODING FAILURE sense syllables, such as YOX and JIH, he
Jimmie turned pale, gripped the measured how much he remembered
chair, cursed, then became frantic: Much of what we sense we never notice, at various times, from 20 minutes to
“What’s going on? What’s happened to and what we fail to encode, we will never 30 days later. The result was his famous
me? Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy? remember (FIGURE 7.14). Age can affect forgetting curve: The course of forgetting
Is this a joke?” When his attention was encoding ability. When young adults is rapid at first, then levels off with time
directed to some children playing base- encode new information, areas of their (Wixted & Ebbesen, 1991).
ball, his panic ended, the dreadful mirror brain jump into action. In older adults, People studying Spanish as a for-
forgotten. these areas are slower to respond. Learn- eign language showed this forgetting
Sacks showed Jimmie a photo from ing and retaining a new neighbor’s name curve for Spanish vocabulary (Bahrick,
National Geographic. “What is this?” he or mastering new technology becomes 1984). Compared with others who had
asked. more of a challenge. This encoding just completed a high school or college
“It’s the Moon,” Jimmie replied. lag helps explain age- related memory Spanish course, people 3 years out of
“No, it’s not,” Sacks answered. “It’s decline (Ward et al., 2020). (For more on school had forgotten much of what they
a picture of the Earth taken from the aging’s effect on memory, see Chapter 3.) had learned. However, what they remem-
Moon.” But no matter how young we are, we bered then, they still mostly remembered
“Doc, you’re kidding! Someone pay conscious attention to only a limited 25+ years later. Their forgetting had lev-
would’ve had to get a camera up there!” portion of the vast number of sights and eled off (FIGURE 7.15).
“Naturally.” sounds bombarding us. Consider: You One explanation for these forgetting
“Hell! You’re joking — how the hell have surely seen the Apple computer curves is a gradual fading of the memory
would you do that?” Jimmie’s wonder logo thousands of times. Can you draw trace, which is a physical change in the
was that of a bright young man from the it? In one study, only 1 of 85 UCLA stu- brain as a memory forms. Researchers
1940s, amazed by his travel back to the dents (including 52 Apple users) could are getting closer to solving the mys-
future. do so accurately (Blake et al., 2015). Without tery of the physical storage and decay of
Careful testing of these unique peo- encoding effort, many might- have- been memories. But memories fade for many
ple reveals something even stranger. memories never form. reasons, including other learning that
Although they cannot recall new facts or disrupts our retrieval.
anything they have done recently, they STORAGE DECAY
can learn new skills and can be classi- RETRIEVAL FAILURE
cally conditioned. Shown hard- to- find “You are already beginning to forget the
figures in pictures (in the Where’s Waldo? material you just read.” So said famed We can compare forgotten events to
series, for example), they can quickly memory researcher Gordon Bower (1973). books you can’t find in your local library.
spot them again later. They can find their Indeed, even after encoding something Some aren’t available because they were
way to the bathroom, though without well, we may later forget it. That master never acquired (not encoded). Others have
being able to tell you where it is. They of nonsense- syllable learning, Hermann been discarded (stored memories decay).
can master mirror- image writing, jigsaw
puzzles, and even complicated procedural
job skills (Schacter, 1992, 1996; Xu & Corkin,
Working/
2001). However, they do all these things with External Sensory Attention short-term Encoding Long-term
memory
no awareness of having learned them. event memory memory storage
Molaison and Jimmie lost their abil- Encoding failure
ity to form new explicit memories, leads to forgetting
but their automatic processing ability
remained intact. They could learn how FIGURE 7.14 Forgetting as encoding failure We cannot remember what we have not encoded.

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