Jogging My Memory

This blog post is a connection to Chapter Eight: Remembering & Judging.

   Memory plays an integral role in our daily lives, whether it be reminiscing on childhood memories or desperately racking your brain for a confirmation code you wrote down an hour ago. In fact, memory is a vital component of learning, and a lot of academic learning in school relies on your semantic memory, or a part of your long-term memory that processes concepts and facts that you didn't learn from personal experience (like your multiplication tables or the formula for photosynthesis).

   Personally, I love to learn, especially through podcasts and videos I find online. Reading through the processes of memory explained in this chapter got me thinking about my many experiences listening to podcasts while jogging. Although I am typically listening to podcasts focused on wildlife and the environment, I have learned about everything from strange diseases to the history behind specific words. However, I don't always retain all of the information being monotonously spoken into my ears during my workout. Whether due to distraction or a lack of visual aids, I find that sometimes the information I hear doesn't make it to my long term memory, and I occasionally ask myself what I just listened to for the past ten minutes. 

   Further, something else that this chapter made me think of was the popular podcast series, Serial. In this series, investigative journalist Sarah Koenig reports on a murder in the Baltimore area in 1999. High school senior Adnan Syed was found guilty of killing his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, but may friends, family members, and acquaintances swear his innocence. Throughout the episodes, Koenig unveils several inconsistencies in stories and gaps in memories while interviewing several people who knew Adnan and Hae. Koenig suspects that Adnan, for one, may have forgotten the events of the day Hae went missing because up until he discovered she was missing later that night, it was a completely normal day that blended in with the rest (in the case that he is innocent). Other inconsistencies may be attributed to the fact that the murder happened eighteen years ago, and a significant amount of time has clearly passed. Similarly, I once watched a 60 Minutes segment where they experimented with recall and memory by setting up a fake robbery and then asking bystanders questions about it. However, they planted fake-bystanders in the interrogation room who didn't actually see the crime, but said incorrect facts to see how many people's memories they could interfere with with their false information. Evidently, human memory is a tricky, and the result of several complex processes.