Why the Human Brain Forgets

2003 Words9 Pages
Many people enroll themselves in motor learning classes so they can learn how other people learn. I enrolled myself in motor learning to learn how my students learn but also to know how that learning is forgotten, if I do end up in the Physical Therapy profession. Donald A. Norman said, “To remember is to have managed three things successfully; the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of information. Failure to remember means failure at managing one of those three things.” (2) Learning goes beyond remembering says Norman, “Learning and remembering are closely related concepts. But learning is more than simply remembering; it is also performance, the ability to do a task with skill…Learning involves purposeful remembering and skillful performance.” (3) So when learning is forgotten it ultimately means that we have not forgotten the skill all together, but that we are having trouble recalling that skill. No skill is lost. It would be helpful to be able to explain what exactly is happening in our brain and body before the process of forgetting even takes place. There have been many studies done on patients so that this concept of learning and transfer of information to the brain could be understood more fully. To be more specific on the topic of this paper, it is not merely that we forget but that we just can’t remember. In the beginning of David Gross’ book entitled ‘Lost Time’ he lays it out very neatly on what exactly do we mean when we say we forget, he says, “I remember. I forget. We hear such statements every day, or we utter them ourselves, but what do they mean? We cannot answer this question satisfactorily just by explaining the how of remembering and forgetting, though this has been the approach of much recent research. For instance one does not come closer to understanding the statement “I remember” simply by grasping the complicated

More about Why the Human Brain Forgets

Open Document