Remembering & Forgetting
By Rick Albright
T
he recent revelations concerning Brian
Williams and Bill O’Reilly”s self deceit was not a
surprise. Upon leaving Vietnam it became apparent to
me that some of the stories told by others on the trip
home began to give the teller more credit than he
claimed the first time the story was told in the
barracks. My wife has spent her entire life helping me
to keep my stories in check, but then we began to
realize that not all of her memories were accurate.
We are brain hobbyists who attend Learning
and the Brain Conferences on a regular
basis to keep up to date with the latest
neuroscience research about
learning and memory. As former
teachers we were always
interested in brain growth and
development to help us
understand how to better
present lessons to our
students so they would
remember what they had been
taught. Despite being mindful
of trying to teach for recall,
former students I have met over
the year seldom remember what
course I taught, much less specific detail.
Some of that may be explained by the fact that I
taught history. I can not tell you how often, upon
learning I was a history teacher, adults tell me how
much they disliked history classes but now that they
are older they love reading about the past.
That is an important aspect of learning, you
must first be interested if you are to remember.
Although that seems obvious, but to understand why
that is true one must know that learning and memory
are two parts of a whole process. Neuroscientists
who investigate these things say that memory is
dependent upon more than electrical interactions
between sod ][H[