MEMORY AND THINKING

Human memory and learning are intimately related since the devel­opment of an association between a stimulus and response requires some sort of retention. Some of our associations, such as conditioned reflexes, are not at the conscious, but at the spinal level of association, although possibly they are 'remembered' there also. For most of the behaviour which distinguishes humans from animals (that is thinking and communicating through language) memory is located in the centre of the nervous system on cortex of the brain. We can think of memory as analogous to some sort of filing cabinet system. Information received through the senses is stored and utilized as needed, within the limits of storage capacity and the personal efficiency for 'searching the files'. (Without this retention process there could be no learned behaviour). Our storage capacity seems to be an inflexible individual characteristic, but the efficiency with which the information is retrieved is a function of a number of influences. Three of these influences, which are general features in memory, are frequency, recency, and value.

Frequency refers, everything else being equal, to the tendency to remember those experiences which have happened most often. Experi­ences or events that occur infrequently are not remembered well. It is also clear that, everything else being equal, we remember the more recent events in contrast to those that occurred in earlier times.

Learning also influences our ability to recall our past experiences. When the learning takes place, how well is the material mastered? How frequently do the lessons occur, and what are the personal priorities we attach to the lessons? All these factors affect the extent to which we can' demonstrate our retention of information.

Thinking must, like memory, be inferred from public behaviour. Thinking is another so-called 'mental' activity, involving the manipula­tion of symbols, signs, concepts, or ideas, which are symbolically repre­sented. Thinking is a process which is closely bound up with language.

To continue with the filing analogy, thinking is the term used to describe the various ways in which the information in storage is retrieved, scanned, examined, combined, and rearranged. We do not actually exam­ine the objects (memories) on 'file', but we may sometimes refer to the verbal description of the remembered events. Memory, learning, thinking, and language are all intimately related processes. So far is this the case that a word may remind you of other words and conjure up images, whereas a perception may conjure up images and also remind you of a linguistic description.

Two types of thinking, i.e. convergent and divergent thinking, are pro­cesses of association between stimuli and responses which arc acceptable according to different criteria. We may also make associations among ideas or experiences. When we are faced with a problem that we wish to solve we usually resort to convergent thinking, depending on our memory to bring forth the best answer that can serve as a solution. If this effort is unrewarding we may resort to trial-and-error or perhaps use a hypothesis as a result of insight, i.e. we may be able to assemble our previous experi­ences in a new way so that we understand the relationships required to solve the task. Our thinking process like many of the actions we perform, is very likely to become habitual and standardized. Most people find it very difficult to change their pattern of thinking, especially if their methods have previously been rewarding.

Through language we understand and communicate the symbols and concepts that we learn. The words in our language are learned initially by association with the objects or events they represent (extension), but we also acquire meaning of words through their relationship to other words and symbols. They are usually clear-cut labels and have only one meaning. The second class of symbols are connotive symbols, and they mark the way we

intend to make people think about these things. Words like 'good', 'happy', 'worthwhile', are some of the connotive-type words used valuatively.

The essential link between thinking and language, we must repeat, comes about because we learn a great deal by description. We read about the experiences of others, of their verbal representations of other objects and ideas. We think by internal manipulation of language, and the very fact that we are able to associate a name successfully with an object is clear evi­dence that our memory stores both the name and a symbolic representa­tion of the thing.

Let us look at just one piece of experiment on linguistic behaviour. Our vocabulary is composed of tens of thousands of words, including a great number of adjectives. We can use adjectives to qualify objects with such words as 'good', 'clean', 'large' and so on. Research has shown that our basic connotive vocabulary can be reduced to the three broad types of adjectives that most people use to describe their environment. The funda­mental adjective types are:

Evaluation: i.e. good... bad Potency: i.e. strong... weak Activity: i.e. active... passive These three pairs of adjectives are the basic meanings that we seem to apply to many of the objects we perceive, learn, and think about. The whole field of relationship of symbols and language is the communica­tion process by which human knowledge is recorded and developed. Language makes it possible for each generation to learn for itself what other generations had learned earlier. Knowledge is cumulative, other­wise each generation would have to learn for itself, for example, all of the principles of science. Cognition is the mental process by which we learn, think, and remember, and we use language to describe and understand the world around us.

(L.S. Skurnik, F. George. «Psychology for Everyman». Penguin Books, 1972, pp. 46 -49)