HUMAN MEMORY

EVERYDAY functioning of our minds or how we make sense of the world is central to Psychology. Memory research, an area that has been explored since 1885, started when Hermann Ebbinghaus published Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. His was a lab-based approach where he set out to study our ability to memorise pure information, screening out the kinds of facts that people might already know would influence the experimental outcome. He designed trigrams, made-up syllables built from three letters – a consonant, a vowel, and a consonant – that had no meaning but looked like words. Ebbinghaus and an assistant carried out these experiments on themselves, learning the trigrams from flashcards, and varying the experiments to see what factors affected their capacity to remember.

This could be called a purely cognitive approach to memory – examining the way information is processed, memorised, and recalled. The work of George A. Miller forms part of this tradition, looking at how much random information we can remember in the short term, and how we can boost our ability to remember. The problem with this kind of approach is that in real life, as we all know, we don’t deal with meaningless information and there is a difference in what we remember when reading a book, tying our shoelaces, or recognising someone we know across the street.

Frederic Bartlett, another pioneer of research into memory, took a markedly different approach. Working in the 1930s, he became interested in how we organise our memories to fit in with things that we already know. Bartlett discovered that we adjust the material we hear so that it makes sense, deciding what to leave in and what to omit. His approach was more about how memory is adjusted in the light of human experience. There are parallels with this approach which can be seen in Freud’s theories about repression and the unconscious, and also in the research carried out by Elizabeth Loftus on eyewitness testimony.

Stubborn beliefs

Perception and cognition relate to what we take in from the world around us and what we make of it. While memory can seem a surprisingly slippery concept, so are the beliefs we hold – or think we hold. Faced with beliefs that clash – known as “cognitive dissonance” – we can end up unconsciously tweaking our beliefs, as if to restore order. There is a stubborn aspect to our belief systems, too. The concept of “confirmation bias” looks at how resistant we can be to information that conflicts with our most firmly held beliefs, and how this is even more marked when we are part of a like-minded group. And while we may claim to try to understand other people’s points of view, our default position, as Lee Ross’s “Fundamental Attribution Error” demonstrates, appears to be that we do no such thing. For example, look at some of the entrenched, anachronistic and insulting views held by some Protestant groups. Or certain factions that exist on social media.

The power of emotion

Understanding emotion, too, is also important: in particular, where it comes from. A century ago, the belief was that physiological changes in the body (like a surge in adrenaline) triggered our emotions. Now it is seen as being about how we interpret the situation in front of us, which is in part to do with the society to which we belong. This begs the question of whether emotions, and how we express them, are universal, or specific to certain cultures. Such questions recur throughout psychology.  

Over many decades of the last century, much of psychology was developed at Western universities, with experiments largely carried out on Western students, leading many to ask if this is a broad enough sample from which to develop universal truths about humankind.

Emotions also drives how we make decisions. Pure rationality would get us nowhere, because in every aspect of our lives we could find ourselves processing an infinite amount of information, but sadly lacking the processing speed of a computer. We need an emotional element to help us to rule out a whole bunch of options – helping us to make decisions based on gut feeling so as to be able to get on with our lives. And all this decision making can take a mental and emotional toll on our resources. As Roy Baumeister’s experiments appeared to show, it is possible simply to run out of the capacity to decide.

(Podcast ends)

---

A Short Biography of George A. Miller (1920–2012)

MILLER studied at Alabama, and gained his Ph.D. at Harvard. He began his research there in the 1940s, looking at speech production and perception, and his Language and Communication (1951) helped to establish the new science of psycholinguistics.

Building on existing mathematical theories of communication, he published a paper on short-term memory capacity, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” It captured the public imagination and even encouraged lively debates on the optimal length of telephone numbers.

He continued to work on the psychology of speech, testing some of Noam Chomsky’s theories, and in 1960 founded (with Jerome Bruner) the Harvard Centre for Cognitive Studies. He is regarded (with Chomsky and Bruner) as one of the founding fathers of cognitive psychology, the study of thought processes – a dramatic departure from behavioural psychology, which stated that since mental processes were not observable, they were not suitable for scientific study.

After a period at New York’s Rockfeller University, working on language acquisition, Miller moved to Princeton where he helped establish both the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory and WordNet, a word database that has applications in present-day search engines and artificial intelligence (AI).