Most of us associate memory with learning, and that is indeed one of its most vital functions, as it allows us to research, understand, and store new information from our experiences in life.
Retention allows us to acquire information by learning from our experiences. It has allowed us humans to adapt to seemingly every new environment, which is what made us the dominant species in the first place.
Importance of memory to human life
The importance of memory to human life is that it allows us to retain information about past events. This allows us to act based upon previous, and current data. This means that it also allows your actions and words to have meaning and a purpose.
It allows us to learn from our mistakes, so we don’t make them again in the present and future. It also allows us to learn what the appropriate manner is to conduct ourselves in the world. Both to survive and how to interact with other people. You can even discover more in-depth how memory works.
Importance of memory in learning
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, its purpose and intention is to keep us alive. Without our working memory, short-term and long-term memory, this would not be possible.
Due to our memory, even our ancient, more primitive ancestors learned many things to survive, such as:
- What to eat and gather
- Which plants were edible and which would make them sick
- What animals to hunt
- Which animals were dangerous and should be avoided
- Where their home was located
- Who they could trust and who was not trustworthy
What we can most certainly conclude is that memory plays a central role in everyone’s life.
It allows us to reflect on the past, which we can then utilize to reuse our past experiences. It can also aid us to guarantee continuity between what was in the past, and what is going to be in the future. Reflecting also allows us to see what mistakes we made to avoid making the same errors.
Memory is an active, although subjective, well-informed, often rational reflection procedure of our experiences. It should be noted though that our memory is not fail-proof, and that even something as intelligent as our mind can make mistakes.
Memory plays an active role in learning, but should not be mistaken for learning. There are 3 main cognitive processes involved in human memory. Those are:
- Encoding
Encoding stands for changing information into a sort that can be stored in the memory.
- Storing
Storing means holding the previously encoded information in our memory for future use.
- Retrieving
Retrieving stands for re-accessing information from the past that has previously been encoded and stored for future use.
What we classify as a single memory are three sub-memories that can be distinguished from each other:
- Working memory
- Short-term memory
- Long-term memory
We won’t go into the details, but the working memory works very briefly to retain the information to manipulate it. The short-term memory in turn stores that retained information for a short while before it gets lost again, or stored in our long-term memory.
Ultimately, the information we are aware of is stored in our long-term memory, where it can be stored for a long time for future usage.
What is memory?
It involves three major processes, which are encoding, storing, retaining, and finally, recalling information about our past experiences to use it to our advantage in the present and future.
However, our retention is not a flawless system. And it is possible to misremember and even to forget things that happened in the past. Previous experiences may be not appropriately encoded in our memory in the first place, which will lead to errors in our thinking.
Conclusion
While many of us have fond memories of our past and youth, that isn’t exactly the most important function of our memory.
We likely have a lot of bad ones as well. Mistakes, we’ve made in the past that we’ve come to regret. And that’s exactly what it’s all about.
The primary function of our memory is to ensure our survival. It accomplishes this feat by figuring out what went wrong in the past, what the dangers were/are, and where the possible pitfalls lie to prevent us from making the same mistakes again. In other words, it allows us from our previous experiences.
1 thought on “Why is memory important: Learning from past experiences”
Comments are closed.