Memory and Its Fallacies
Memory is absolutely crucial both to our inquiry into the nature of the human mind in general and cognition in particular. Information floods into the human senses from many sources. Memory acts as a highly selective method of recording and retaining this information (sometimes only briefly). It is memory that gives a human a sense of their personal past, something that grounds them in the world of reality. It is memory that is central to the formation of a life narrative. And it is the incomplete, sketchy nature of memory, its omissions, and the errors endemic to it, that have helped distort our understanding not only of ourselves, but of other people and the world around us.
Formal Definitions of the Term Memory
The American Psychological Association defines memory as:
1. the ability to retain information or a representation of past experience, based on the mental processes of learning or encoding, retention across some interval of time, and retrieval or reactivation of the memory.
2. specific
information or a specific past experience that is recalled.
3. the
hypothesized part of the brain where traces of information and past experiences
are stored.1
Two researchers writing in 2019 emphasized an important point. They argued that if memory was only understood as information storage and retrieval, then the term could cover a great many different phenomena, perhaps an unlimited number. True memory, they contend, is physical. Memories are incorporated in brains, not cloud servers.2
Another source, summarizing the subject of memory, stresses that memory is a “diverse set of cognitive capacities” we use to keep information and past experiences for purposes in the present. Memory is a key element in personal identity. It differs from both perception and imagination, but “in practice, there can be close interactions between remembering, perceiving, and imagining”. It is often filled with emotion, and yet it is essential for rational thinking. It has an association with dreams. It affects our perception of ourselves as beings living in time. And it can go wrong, sometimes catastrophically so.3
So we can say that memory is yet another epiphenomenon of the brain’s physical evolution. Memory is a form of representation, a way the brain represents the outside world to us and our role in it. What brought about its emergence?
The Evolution of Human Memory
What we call memory is actually a collection of different kinds of remembering, with different features, functions, and processes. These varieties of memory evolved along different paths and at different times. Researchers study the non-human animals to gain insight into how humans acquired these capabilities.
A team of researchers studying the evolution of human memory has listed the steps which they believe to be the general sequence in which this faculty developed. First, all animals have reinforcement learning systems, one of the first things animals evolved. [This of course refers to the way animals learn to avoid negative stimuli and gravitate to positive stimuli.] Second, vertebrates developed the navigation system which gave them, at first, the ability to represent novel routes in their brains as maps, and which later became adapted to a variety of behaviors. Third, as the neocortex evolved, there emerged what is called a biased-competition system. This allowed early mammals to regulate the older systems that competed with each other to guide behavior.
In early primates there evolved the manual-foraging system. This capability arose in newer cortical areas. It allowed primates to make choices that facilitated their ability to reach for and handle desirable things on tree branches (such as fruit or insects). The feature system first appeared in anthropoid primates, both in older brain areas and in the newer parts of the parietal and temporal lobes. In the words of the researchers, “It improved the perception and memory of both the qualitative and quantitative features of their world, which guided long-distance foraging as they became larger, farther ranging animals.” As the newer regions of the frontal lobe evolved, there emerged the goal system:
It generated goals—the targets of action—from representations of goal-related events, as well as from abstract strategies. Yet later, during human evolution, the feature and goal systems began to perform more-general functions, resulting in sophisticated reasoning, symbolic communication, and mathematics, along with the generalizations, concepts, and categories that underlie semantic memories.
Finally, early humans developed representations of themselves and others—the social-subjective system. In interaction with the older systems, this gave humans the sense of participating in events and gathering in facts. This is the basis of autobiographical memory and cultural knowledge.4
Psychologist James S. Nairne emphasizes a crucial point: the capacity to remember aided survival, and if had not done so, it would have ultimately faded in importance. He contends that the evidence supports the view that memory evolved to enhance fitness. The implication here is obvious: memory evolved to emphasize survival information and to pay less attention to the non-essential.5 This was the memory that evolved to help our ancestors survive in a dangerous, challenging environment. This was the memory that helped Homo sapiens sapiens gain dominance over the rest of the animal kingdom. It is not—is not—a comprehensive record of everything we experience. Realistically, if a person registered every single thing their senses gathered in, they would be overwhelmed by trivia and virtually unable to function. Memory evolved to be selective, for a reason.
Psychologist Merlin Donald, in the early 1990s, proposed an overarching theory of memory evolution. Donald sought to establish a chronology of memory evolution that corresponded to the evolution of an increasingly more sophisticated brain in the members of the genus Homo. First, he pointed out that the chief areas of brain expansion in Homo erectus appear to have occurred in the hippocampus, cerebellum, and association cortex. The tool-making skills and extensive migrations of erectus appear to support this, he contends. Secondly, early Homo sapiens had a brain size in the modern range and is thought to have had a descended larynx. Early Homo sapiens was therefore probably capable of speech. Donald argued that a third great cognitive development was the beginning of the use of symbols in the Upper Paleolithic era, which established the external memory as a feature of human life.6
Donald emphasizes the significance of voluntary access to memory representations, the ability of a human to remember things at will, what other researchers have called explicit memory retrieval. The foundation for this, he argues, emerged as the human brain evolved the capacity for mimesis, which he defines as “a supramodal, motor-modeling capacity…which created representations that had the critical property of voluntary retrievability.” [Emphasis in the original.] Mimesis had what he called a self-triggered rehearsal loop that “could voluntarily access and retrieve its own outputs”.7 And as Donald says elsewhere,
The evolution of voluntary conscious access to memory may account for many, if not most, of the distinguishing characteristics of human memory. The unique human capacity for accessing our memory banks provided a platform on which the spiraling co-evolution of human cognition and culture could be constructed.8
We can gain insight into the evolution of memory itself by examining some of the hypotheses surrounding the evolution of particular forms of memory. (We will briefly survey these forms below.) Episodic memory, the ability to remember specific experiences, appears to have evolved in more than just our species. Significant evidence indicates there are non-human animals who possess what researchers call its “core properties”. It appears to be widespread in mammals and it can be found in certain bird species. The brain structures that comprise the system that supports episodic memory are the hippocampus, the parahippocampal region (a structure which surrounds much of the medial temporal lobe), and the prefrontal cortex. Such a system appears to exist among many non-human species, and there are even structures in reptiles and certain fish that are similar to the hippocampus. This implies that episodic memory was reproductively advantageous for many species. (However it cannot be said that simply because an animal has a hippocampus that the animal possesses episodic memory, since the hippocampus is involved in spatial memory, a type of memory that seems more fundamental.) The origins of episodic memory might conceivably stretch back to the period before the divergence of the mammalian and reptilian lines, although solid evidence for this has not yet emerged.9
Working memory also may have very deep evolutionary roots. Working memory is that memory system used to keep immediately useful information about the outside world in the conscious mind for a limited period of time. As one researcher puts it, its mechanism is “executively controlled attention”.
It is also widely accepted that WM is quite limited in span, restricted to three or four chunks of information at any one time. Moreover, there are significant and stable individual differences in WM abilities between people, and these have been found to predict comparative performance in many other cognitive domains. Indeed, they account for most (if not all) of the variance in fluid general intelligence, or g.10
Do any non-human animals possess this capacity? Studies indicate that many primate species appear to have working memory abilities analogous to those of humans. Other primate species may even share the human ability for using WM in planning. Where humans differ, of course, is the sophistication and flexibility of their working memories, and in their ability to maintain their focus and attention. It should be added that there is a great deal still to learn about how our abilities compare to the non-human primates.11
As we have seen, generally speaking, the more widespread a trait is in the animal kingdom, the older it is. We can see glimmerings of memory-related abilities going back tens of millions of years, originating in the ability of animals to learn which stimuli were pleasant or unpleasant and retaining that information. Brain structures implicated in memory are found across many species. As the human brain evolved, these structures were elaborated on and added to until there emerged the complex, varied phenomenon we call memory. The evolution of human memory continues to be elucidated, but there are certainly aspects of this evolution that will never be fully explained.
The Varieties of Memory
The different forms of memory evolved to facilitate the performance of specific tasks. They also have a variety of neural correlates, although the hippocampus plays a central role. How do scientists classify these forms, and why is there disagreement about the exact number? Constructing a taxonomy of memory is challenging because of these disagreements. Some prefer to explain the varieties of memory by breaking memory into broad categories. A 1998 taxonomy, cited by neuroscientist David Linden, divides memory into two basic types, Declarative, labeled explicit, and Nondeclarative, labeled implicit. Under Declarative there are only two categories: facts and events. Under Nondeclarative are only four: Procedural, which encompasses skills and habits, Priming (when a stimulus affects how one reacts to a subsequent stimulus), Simple classical conditioning, and Nonassociative learning.12 (In many taxonomies, Declarative and Nondeclarative memory are described as aspects of Long-Term Memory.)
To elaborate on this, Declarative Memory encompasses episodic memory, to which we referred above, and semantic memory, which basically means information and concepts that are retained in the long term and the cognitive processes which facilitate this retention.13, 14 Nondeclarative memory has been characterized by two specialists as “a heterogeneous collection of nonconscious learning capacities…that are expressed through performance and that do not afford access to any conscious memory content.”15
Other researchers break memory
into a variety of subcategories, some of them quite specialized. We will try to
make sense of all this by beginning with some basic distinctions.
A. General Categories
Working Memory and Short-Term Memory
Working memory and short-term memory are usually conflated, but there are researchers who see them as distinct entities. Working memory, as we saw above, has been defined as “the small amount of information that can be held in mind and used in the execution of cognitive tasks”.16 When a human is doing something that requires information that does not need to be stored for future reference, they are using working memory. Some researchers maintain that working memory is simply that aspect of short-term memory that has the shortest duration. It should also be noted that memory researchers refer to the fading of memories as decay.
Sensory Memory
Sensory memory, as the name implies, is the perception of sensory input. It is of extremely short duration and usually is not registered consciously.17 When someone speaks to us it allows us to recall that fact, and it has a significant capacity.18
Long-Term Memory
When a human brain stores memories for more than the brief time in which a task is being performed, we say that the memory has become long term. Long-term memories can stretch across an entire lifetime. As we saw above, many researchers consider Declarative (explicit and conscious) and Nondeclarative (implicit and non-conscious) memory to be the major categories of Long-Term Memory.19
B. Major Subcategories
Episodic Memory
Declarative Memory’s first great division is episodic memory, to which we have already referred. An academic journal defines it as follows:
Episodic memory involves the ability to learn, store, and retrieve information about unique personal experiences that occur in daily life. These memories typically include information about the time and place of an event, as well as detailed information about the event itself. The ability to describe the details of a recent holiday gathering or office meeting that took place in the previous weeks or months, for example, depends heavily on intact episodic memory function.20
One the major investigators of episodic memory has described what he believes to be the mental processes associated with the retrieval of such memories. He says that episodic memories depend on a sense of self, a human’s understanding that they exist. Episodic memories are also associated with autonoetic awareness, the realization that personal experiences happened to one’s self, that they happened in the past and are not still happening, and that they are now a part of one’s life story. He further contends that humans possess a sense of subjective time that allows them to differentiate between representations of the self in the past or present and possible representations in the future. Another specialist adds that episodic memory in essence answers certain questions: What happened, when did it happen, and where did it happen.21
An aspect of episodic memory, according to a number of researchers, is called Relational Memory. Relational Memory is defined by one pair of experts as, “representations of arbitrary or accidentally occurring relations among the constituent elements of experience.”22 Somewhat more prosaically, another source simply says “Relational memory is the ability to remember arbitrary or indirect associations between objects, places, people or events -- such as names and faces.”23
Semantic Memory
The other great division of Declarative Memory is semantic memory. Semantic memory consists of everything a human has learned (or think they have learned) about the world around them. This includes not only knowledge itself but the concepts necessary to gather and process that knowledge, such as the use of language. Two specialists investigating the neurobiology of semantic memory explain the subjects it contains:
A short list of examples includes the names and physical attributes of all objects, the origin and history of objects, the names and attributes of actions, all abstract concepts and their names, knowledge of how people behave and why, opinions and beliefs, knowledge of historical events, knowledge of causes and effects, associations between concepts, categories and their bases, and on and on.24
Semantic memory is crucial in the development of human culture, inasmuch as it is a storehouse of information that can be conveyed to others. Semantic memory’s ability to form concepts from the information it holds (an emergent phenomenon, in my view) is of the highest significance in human life.
C. Additional Subcategories
Motor Memory
Motor memory is concerned with physical skills and abilities. Three experts on the subject have stated, “Motor memory is the process by which humans can adopt both persistent and flexible motor behaviours.”25 Put more directly, motor memory allows people to improve their physical skills through training and repetition and helps them deal with rapidly changing physical situations. This is often referred to as muscle memory. It is the basis of all physical skills that can improve with repetition, and is considered to be a nondeclarative category of memory.
Spatial Memory
Spatial memory allows a human to recall the position and location of objects or places. It gives humans the ability to orientate themselves and to estimate direction and distance. Spatial memory is how humans learns to navigate and remember routes. It has representations in both short-term and log-term memory.26
Involuntary Memory
Involuntary memories come into our conscious awareness without us having summoned them. Images or audio memories that pop into our heads spontaneously are of this variety. As we will see later, the brain’s ability to associate particular stimuli with specific memories is a major source of involuntary recollections. Specific smells or visual cues or pieces of music can cause such memories to emerge. Involuntary memories are an extremely normal part of our mental life, and can even be useful in emergency situations that demand fast action. More darkly, however, those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder can find disturbing, terrible memories of this kind very difficult to suppress. Drug flashbacks and partial epileptic seizures can also cause them to emerge.27
Adaptive Memory
As we noted above, memory evolved because it was adaptively useful. There are researchers who give this adaptive trait its own category. A team of specialists describes its salient features:
Memory has been described as “adaptive” from at least two perspectives. One perspective suggests that the memory system has evolved to preferentially encode and retrieve information potentially relevant to survival in ancestral conditions. Indeed, information encoded while imagining such conditions is better remembered, an advantage known as the survival processing effect. The other perspective points out that our memory system is biased towards information associated with the anticipation or obtainment of reward. [Citations removed.]28
Researchers also examine autobiographical memory (as an aspect of episodic memory), emotional memories (as distinct from memories about emotion) which are considered implicit, and object recognition memories (as an aspect of semantic memory).
There is, in addition, a somewhat controversial category: Eidetic Memory. Sometimes known as photographic memory, those in possession of eidetic memory are said to be able to remember things with startling accuracy because they can take a “mental picture” of them. A researcher of this subject emphasizes the fact that the photographic images in the memories of those claiming this ability are often sketchy and incomplete, or even contain elements which were not present in the original. It appears that the vast majority of those with abilities that could be called eidetic are children.29 However, it should also be noted that autistic savants demonstrate extraordinary memory abilities. As one researcher put it, “Whatever the particular savant skill, it is always linked to massive memory.”30
The Physiology of Memory Storage and Memory Formation
How are memories stored in the brain? Research has indicated that memories reside in the hippocampus and other structures of the medial temporal lobe, and in the frontal cortex, but how are they stored at the deepest level, that of neurons and synapses, and how are they formed? The full story has yet to be completely elucidated, but much has been discovered.
A prominent psychologist explains that protein building is a fundamental part of the process of memory formation, inasmuch as proteins are key components of synaptic receptors and disrupting these proteins harms memory.31 Neuroscientists have traditionally contended that memories are stored in synapses, but some recent research has revealed that memories may actually be stored inside of brain cells.32 In fact, memory formation may be a distributed brain process. Researchers at Cornell explain it this way:
A new study now reveals that in the brain, a complex memory similarly consists of a whole and its parts. The researchers found that while the overall experience is stored in the hippocampus, the brain structure long considered the seat of memory, the individual details are parsed and stored elsewhere, in the prefrontal cortex. This separation ensures that, in the future, exposure to any individual cue is sufficient to activate the prefrontal cortex, which then accesses the hippocampus for recall of the whole memory.33
Regarding the issue of cellular storage, a team of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has determined that the stimulation of a small, very specific set of brain cells can cause the expression of a specific memory. It’s as if Wilder Penfield’s experiments with the electrical stimulation of the brain, which helped establish the fact that the mind is a matter-based phenomenon, are being recapitulated with 21st century technology. In this instance light was used to stimulate light-activated proteins in the brain.34
Recent research finds that although conscious experience is continuous, memories seem to be stored as discrete, individual moments. There appears to be evidence of what some researchers call cognitive boundaries in the storing of these moments. A “soft boundary” is a transition from one scene in memory to another very similar to it, or a memory congruent with the first one. A “hard boundary” in this hypothesis represents two scenes that are significantly different. Hard boundary memories are distinct, closed pictures, to which nothing more will be added. The greater the difference between two memories, the harder the boundary.
The researchers…noticed two distinct groups of cells that responded to different types of boundaries by increasing their activity. One group, called “boundary cells” became more active in response to either a soft or hard boundary. A second group, referred to as “event cells” responded only to hard boundaries. This led to the theory that the creation of a new memory occurs when there is a peak in the activity of both boundary and event cells, which is something that only occurs following a hard boundary.35
Research in the early decades of the 21st century has reinforced the concept of distributed memory. Groups of neurons known as neural ensembles (sometimes called engram cells) handle the storage and processing tasks. Such ensembles now appear to maintain the same memories in different areas of the brain, forming what is called an engram complex. Synapses form pathways connecting these complexes.36
The ability of the brain to form memories is yet another example of the brain’s plasticity. Events in the environment, conveyed by the sensory and perceptual pathways, cause excitatory synapses to react. These excitatory connections are altered by what is known as the Hebbian mechanism, a process that is now widely believed to be the chief means by which memories are formed.37 A team of researchers has explained this mechanism by saying, “A long-standing hypothesis termed ‘Hebbian plasticity’ suggests that memories are formed through strengthening of synaptic connections between neurons with correlated activity.” Their research shows, however, that the Hebbian mechanism alone does not form memories, and that certain neuromodulators are necessary to this task.38
The Content of Memory
Long-term memories materialize at various speeds, are experienced, and then evanesce. Their relative vividness is a product of the frequency with which they emerge and the significance (to the person having them) of the event that caused their formation. And if we were to carefully and objectively examine the pictures of remembered events we see in our heads, we would admit that the images are sketchy, indistinct around the edges, almost as if they were semi-transparent at times. This is something shared with imagined images, which have the same kind of low resolution. Audio memories can emerge as if someone were playing a sound file. These audio memories can be startlingly clear at times, but at others they are almost (internally) inaudible or transient. However, greater amounts of detail can be recalled when the subject of the memory is particularly intense. This is especially true for traumatic memories or the memory of major historical events.
The term Flashbulb Memory is used to describe memories of events which are so stunning, dramatic, unexpected, and/or unprecedented that a multitude of small details surrounding these events are remembered. Moreover, many people can experience flashbulb memories almost simultaneously if an event is public and particularly impactful, although each person will have a unique perception of these events. Although people tend to swear they are recalling flashbulb events with complete accuracy, extensive research proves this is not the case. Even traumatic memories can be marked by significant errors and omissions. Errors can arise in the weeks and months after the event, and these can become permanent components of the memory. Errors associated with public events can be changed by exposure to new information. But errors in traumatic memories can persist for many years, even for life.39
Incomplete Memories, Polluted Memories, False Memories, and Confabulation
No one remembers every detail of events or every detail of what they see (with the exception of savants who can draw an entire cityscape from memory). There are innumerable gaps in our recollection of experiences. Moreover, memory is “polluted” by the human tendency to fill in missing parts with what is actually conjecture, not true recall. By its very nature, such conjecture is unconscious. There is also the phenomenon many of us experience when attempting to remember events from very early in our lives. How much are we actually remembering, and how much of what we recall about events that took place when we were children is actually information we have been told? Sorting this out is often virtually impossible. Memory is colored further by our emotional state at the time of the memory’s formation, especially if the event being remembered elicited a powerful emotional response in us, or if we were already in an emotionally vulnerable or psychologically fluid state at the time. Neurological problems which are still not well-understood are also a factor.
The result of these various memory-related issues can be false memories, memories of events that we did not actually experience. One writer puts it this way:
It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.40
False memories are often spoken of in the same breath as confabulation. Despite certain similarities, they are not the same thing. Confabulation means a “memory” that is completely made up by a person, an account of something which did not happen to anyone, and which is not based on stories a person has been told. This made-up memory is sincerely believed, many times only temporarily, and researchers have found that confabulations are often the product of injury or psychosis. Confabulations can be spoken spontaneously or result from being asked questions.
Some researchers believe that both false memories and confabulations are created by the human need for a coherent narrative of events, the influence of autobiographical knowledge, and the processes of imagination, among other elements. A dysfunctional ventromedial prefrontal cortex, in the frontal lobe of the brain, has been identified as a neurological cause in both. However, false memories and confabulations differ from each other in important ways. False memories, unlike confabulations, tend to have a strong emotional component, often connected with sexual content. False memories are also connected to suggestibility.41
Other Aspects of Memory
Learned information can also interfere with memory. When new information is learned it can hamper the ability of a person to recall previous memories. Scientists refer to this as retroactive interference. The inverse of this is proactive interference, which is when previously learned information impairs the ability to recall new information. Retroactive interference is now generally believed to be the cause of most ordinary forgetting.42
…when memories are retrieved they are susceptible to change, such that future retrievals call upon the changed information. This is called reconsolidation. That reconsolidation exists is not at issue, but what really reconsolidation is, how it occurs, and what it means are heavily investigated and debated topics.43
There are researchers who contend that reconsolidation is not universal, and that many times it occurs only under specific circumstances.44 There is much still to be learned about this subject, but enough is known for many researchers to now see memory, both its formation and storage, as a dynamic process, one which is in a continuous state of change.45
Social conformity memory, or as it is often referred to, memory conformity, has a major impact on individual memories. Memory conformity occurs when people discuss an event they have experienced with other people. This can have the effect of altering an individual’s memory of the event. This effect is particularly pronounced when people discuss something they have all witnessed. Research shows that eyewitnesses to crimes (or alleged crimes) often “remember” details they didn’t actually see after discussing the event with those who actually did see the detail.46
Research has consistently shown that emotion can have a profound effect on memory. One team of psychologists put it this way: “Substantial evidence has established that emotional events are remembered more clearly, accurately and for longer periods of time than are neutral events.” It appears that emotional memories are stronger than neutral ones because emotional memories involve the integration of numerous brain regions, including both the amygdala and hippocampus, among others.47
We noted above that when remembering our early childhood that it is difficult for us to be sure what we are actually remembering and what we were told. And no one remembers being a baby. Freud called this infantile amnesia, and for many years researchers thought that this was tied to the acquisition of language, since it appears that the earliest memories children have go back to the time they start to speak. But recent research (which is still being pursued) attributes the memory deficit of early childhood to the creation of new neurons, which may act to disrupt existing circuits in the infant brain. The hippocampus, which is one of the few brain regions that generates neurons, may actually be unconsciously clearing out early child memories. As production of new neurons levels off, the long-term memory may begin to be established. These conclusions, it should be noted, are not yet the consensus of scientific opinion.48 (See the discussion on synaptic pruning in infants on pages 555 and 557 of this volume.)
Cryptomnesia is the phenomenon of believing that an idea one has is new when, in fact, it is a memory. Cryptomnesia is also at work when someone believes an artistic inspiration is their own when in fact they are remembering someone else’s artistic expression. For example, writers, immersed in the world of books, may unconsciously “borrow” someone else’s idea or phrasing. As people are exposed to more and more information, the tendency toward confusing new ideas and memory may be becoming more widespread.49
The Mandela Effect is a false memory of an event that is held by a large number of people. Its name derives from a widely-held belief that South African leader Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s, when in fact no such thing had occurred, even though many people “remembered” it happening. There are many examples of this phenomenon, and some neurologists suspect that confabulation, reconsolidation, and memory conformity are all at work in such situations.50
Neuroscientist Eric Kandel, in his examination of memory (which also acts as an autobiography), describes the significance of memory to humans:
…memory provides our lives with continuity. It gives us a coherent picture of the past that puts current experience in perspective. The picture may not be rational or accurate, but it persists. Without the binding force of memory, experience would be splintered into as many fragments as there are moments in life. Without the mental time travel provided by memory, we would have no awareness of our personal history, no way of remembering the joys that serve as the luminous milestones of our life. We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.51
Memory evolved as a survival strategy, and it has become intertwined with every aspect of cognition. Memory is absolutely essential to us, and its loss, whether through injury or disease, is a tragedy for the human who has suffered this loss. Without memory, a human is completely unmoored from their own past, with no understanding of who they are, the people they have known, the road that has brought them to the point in life to which they have come, and no knowledge of what they have experienced. However, there is a great paradox at work here. Memory, which is so vital to us, can also mislead us disastrously. Traumatic memories can even destroy us if not properly dealt with. Memories are not analogous to video recording devices. They do not give us a fully accurate picture of our experience. When this is understood, we come be more selective and more judicious in our use of them. The external memory—the keeping of written and visual records—emerged out of the need to preserve experiences which even the extraordinary feats of the oral history tradition could not preserve. It is the existence of this external memory which makes the study of human history possible, and which maintains the record upon which the arts, sciences, mathematics, literature, and all other areas of human learning depend. Learning itself relies on memory, and memory and learning are intimately connected. It is to the study of human learning to which we will now turn.
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