How We Can Get In the Way of Our Memory Processes

How we can get in the way of our Memory Processes
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November 2, 2017
Introduction
It is a clear fact that throughout our evolutionary history as humans, certain changes have happened in every aspect of our lives, including our physiological, emotional, and psychological characteristics. While developments in our physiological characteristics are most apparent, those which happened in our emotional and psychological ones are more subtle and unnoticeable in every manner of being. Nonetheless, despite these changes, studies in evolutionary psychology have proven that one of the oldest and most developed psychological traits that we have retained over time is our survival instinct, which includes our inclination towards survival-relevant processes (Buss, 2015). In the study done by Stillman, et. al (2014), they tested adults as to how does age affect an individual’s survival processing as a memory process, relative to other “non-survival related contexts”. In the end, they found out that age has something to do with an increase and/or decrease in our inclination towards processing survival related contexts. In another interview done by Siegel and Cornish (2014) to Psychologist Linda Henkel from Fairfield University, they discussed how our excessive reliance on taking photos of events rather than personally focusing on the experience could affect how we remember things. Following from these statements above, the author of this article would try to focus on analyzing how our actions and other external factors could “get in the way” of our memory processes. More particularly, he would discuss the effects of age as an intrinsic factor, and our hobby of taking pictures, as extrinsic ones, in relation to how we affect our memory processes. Nevertheless, the author of this article believes that both intrinsic and extrinsic factors play a huge role in influencing our memory processes.
Shaping our Memory Processes
According to Matlin (2005), memory processes are processes of “maintaining information over time”. Generally, this process is believed to occur in three stages, which are encoding, storage, and recall. However, despite this seemingly simple and straightforward way of how our brains maintain information, studies done on the subject matter show that instead of being “recollective” – where our brains pull out exact pictures of the events – our memory is indeed “reconstructive” where we recreate events in our minds using elements that we’ve seen in a particular event (Howe, Knott, & Conway, 2017). In line with our effect on our memory processes, this could mean that in order to “make the most” out of our memories, what we need to do is to gather more “visual elements” that could trigger our minds to reconstruct specific events, so that we could “remember it”. Perhaps, one of the misconceptions, why we are fond of taking photos of ourselves and our experiences, is that we believe that once we see them, our minds could then reconstruct the emotions included in the experience. As according to Professor Hankel, when we take photos of ourselves, the scenery around us...