Writing Assignment 2-Memory

Behavior is a tricky subject. Oh, I forgot. Memory.  Memory is something that I feel can be taken for granted.  So many times I find myself saying, “I’ll remember. I don’t need to write that down.” Only to find out what I was supposed to remember happened yesterday, and I forgot all about it.  

This video was very entertaining, especially his very spikey hair.  I enjoyed his examples and find it very true how the details of a penny, something we see daily, are hard to remember.  The drawings were quite comical too.  

I find that it is easier to remember things that benefit our lives or things that will make us feel good.  We associate the beneficial feeling with the memory of what we need to do to achieve it.  It was very interesting in the demonstration that people “remembered” words from both lists that weren’t actually on the lists.  I too “remembered” one of those words. It’s interesting, because we associate the word sweet with the others listed, such as candy, sugar, soda, chocolate, etc.; therefore, we assumed it was on the list as well.

I believe our memories are strongly based on associations.  There are many times that I ponder memories and wonder, did this really happen or was it a dream or story I’ve heard.  The story about the man, Chris, who chose a fake story as a memory was so intriguing.  I feel it happens all the time.  And most of those times, we don’t ever acknowledge it isn’t a real event that we are remembering.  

Sometimes we struggle to remember what we did five minutes ago, but we can remember vividly what we were doing when we were five years old.  My grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when I was about 16.  Over the course of 3 years, her memory became less and less.  She could remember stories from when she grew up or when her children were young but could not recognize particular people or remember to turn off the stove.  It is a complex disease and just shows how complex our memory can be.  

Memory is a precious thing.  It’s our own personal filing system of our life’s events.  Sometimes our memories can get buried or misplaced, but I feel like they are always in there.  Some just take more searching to recover.  Some hold stronger value or meaning and some we want to suppress.  Even those memories, the ones we wish we didn’t have and try to rid of, are stuck with us.  Personally though, I will take the bad ones if it means I can remember the good ones too!

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