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MEMORY THROUGH THE AGES

MEMORY THROUGH THE AGES. Prescientific approaches Ancient gods for memory Greek and Roman philosophy Plato (427-347 BC) Innate concepts and memories Metaphoric mechanisms for Encoding (a scribe; misencoding) Storage (wax tablet; distortable) Retrieval (aviary; retrieval failure)

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MEMORY THROUGH THE AGES

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  1. MEMORY THROUGH THE AGES Prescientific approaches Ancient gods for memory Greek and Roman philosophy • Plato (427-347 BC) • Innate concepts and memories • Metaphoric mechanisms for • Encoding (a scribe; misencoding) • Storage (wax tablet; distortable) • Retrieval (aviary; retrieval failure) • Aristotle (384-322 BC) • Retention versus “recollection” • Laws of association in recall • Contiguity, similarity, contrast

  2. Aristotle’s On Memory and Reminiscence • Memory vs. recollection • Memory is necessary, not sufficient for recollection • Recollection a form of inference (attribution?) placing ourselves in a certain time and space • Some phrases sound like implicit/explicit, some availability/accessibility • Recollection and association • Retrieval as “movement” between related memories • Associative “laws” (contiguity, similarity) • Automatic cuing vs. effortful search • Interesting comments about: • Rehearsal and practice • Concrete vs. abstract “codes” • Role of the “substrate” (hard/soft walls) • Recollection may be in error • Arousal hurts memory • Dwarfs have lousy memory

  3. Prescientific approaches(cont’d) • Cicero (106-43 BC) • Practical aspects of memory • “method of loci” for remembering order • Augustine (354-430 AD) • Sensory vs. ‘intellectual” memories • Active nature of remembering • Potential for “false memories” • Importance of emotion in memory

  4. The Renaissance:Empirical observation • Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) • Spanish humanist/empiricist • “Three Books on the Soul of Life” (1538) • Importance of rehearsal for retention • Utility of “memory exercise” and practice • Three sources of forgetting • “image’ is erased or destroyed • Smeared or fragmented • Or “escapes our search” • Francis Bacon (1561-1626) • British philosopher/humanist • Describes the “inductive method” • Basic skills of memory, fancy, reason • Mnemonic strategies • Visual imagery • Study prior to sleeping • Varied encoding • Selective memory search (“prenotion”)

  5. British Empricism and Continental Nativism • Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) • Memory as “decaying sensations” • Knowledge results from experience • Founds British empiricist tradition (Locke, Hume, Hartley, Mill) • Rene Descartes (1596-1650) • Mental laws vs. physical (dualism) • Importance of innate concepts and processes

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