So you can quote verbatim from a Guy de Maupassant work that you studied in junior high, but you just dialed a phone number and can`t remember whose? All it means is that you`re quite normal, for memory is selective.
``We are amazing as storage devices,`` says Robert A. Bjork, a UCLA psychology professor and an expert on memory. ``There`s apparently almost no limit to what we can store in memory. But at any one time, we can have highly selective access in the sense of being able to recall.
``What`s accessible to us is very dependent on our mood state, our physical state, our environmental surroundings, interpersonal surroundings.``
For example: ``If you`re at a high-school reunion, or walking around the town in which you grew up, there will be almost a rush of memories (causing) you to recall events and names you might not have thought about in decades.``
Memory, Bjork says, is not a container that fills up; rather it`s ``some sort of scaffolding structure`` -- the more it`s built up, the more places there are to put things.
-- ``You remember statistics of big games. They don`t mean much now, but they`ve kind of stuck in there. I remember pretty well the plays from a game in 1981 when I scored 29 points for the Houston Rockets against the Boston Celtics. I have trouble remembering birthdays and anniversaries.``
-- Los Angeles Laker Coach Mike Dunleavy
-- ``The memory machine is selective about what gets in and selective about how it changes over time,`` says Elizabeth Loftus, professor of psychology at the University of Washington and author of several books on memory.
``You just remember the happier times in your life and forget about the sad times,`` says Loftus. ``People remember their vacations as being happier than they actually were. They forget that it rained and the car ran out of gas. You remember things in selective ways so your memory conforms to how you wish the past was.``
None of this indicates any mental aberration, she says. In fact, ``depressed people tend to dwell on the bad stuff. Sometimes, their memories can be in some ways a little more accurate.``
She refers to memory as having a ``superiority complex. You remember that you gave more to charity or your kids walked and talked at an earlier age than they actually did. You conveniently forget things that maybe were embarrassing to you.``
This is different from lying, she says, in that false memories are actually created over time and that people recall embellished or distorted events with great conviction. ``It`s their truth,`` she says.
What has happened to the original, accurate memory? Loftus believes it actually may have been destroyed.
``We`ll show people an accident where a car goes through a red light and then ask leading and suggestive questions until we get people to say it was a green light,`` she says. Later, even under hypnosis, ``that red light can`t be found.`` In a new book, Witness for the Defense, she explores ``how memory fails in criminal situations, leading to conviction of the wrong person and other tragedies in the criminal justice system.``
Life`s accumulation of memories is warped through the retelling process, too, Bjork says: ``It may be that we end up not remembering this thing that happened when we were 12 in some literal way, we remember only what we recall about it.``
-- ``I memorized all the presidents of the United States in chronological order, just to keep my brain sharp. I can still recite them. I learned all the states and their capitals, too, and can do those. What do I tend to forget? The names of people I don`t really care about.``
-- Abigail Van Buren
-- Mark Rosenzweig, a University of California psychologist with a longtime interest in the brain mechanisms of memory, says, ``The things that are important, or have consequences for us, tend to be remembered. However, we`re awfully good in general at remembering even the inconsequential.``
But, he points out, there is a big difference between ``what`s stored in memory and what`s available at any given moment for retrieval. We may not get access to it at the time we want.``
Access, he says, is determined partly by ``the extent to which one is in the same situation as when one first learned or first acquired the information. If you want to be able to do a performance that depends on memory, the more you`re able to practice in the situation in which you`re expected to perform, the better off you`ll be.``
-- ``I remember a fight about money that my aunt had with my father in the kitchen when I was a boy. It`s a searing emotional memory for me, coming from a repressed Irish Catholic New England background. When I run into financial problems, like my father did, bam, there it is. But I`m very forgetful...I can reconstruct the history of evolution but I can`t remember whether I`ve put the sugar in my wife`s tea.``