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Neuroscience & Karma
effect may be there for ever. Early influences in childhood remain with us, at least to some extent and psycho-analysts will say that there are many buried 'unconscious' memories that can yet be recalled. It is quite likely that what we call 'forgetting' is, in fact, the interference of subsequent learning. It is assumed that 'memory traces' show some exponential decay with time, perhaps due to quasi-random neural activity, but there is little physiological basis for this.
The value of forgetting might not seem as important as that of remembering, but "if we remember everything, we should be as ill as if we remembered nothing" said William James. Aside from rare cases, forgetting is commonplace. Without this ability, our mind would be cluttered with useless trivial matter.
7. Prodigies of Memory
There are great variations between individuals in capacity to remember, and a few people have memories that seem quite fantastic. People with 'iconic memories' can study a page for a few moments and then recite everything written there. These people seem to have a literally photographic memory. This faculty is somewhat disturbing to our scheme for understanding the brain model as a semantically organized system.
Other memorizers report that they do, in fact, use programs that involve meaning. In his study, The Mind of a Mnemonist, Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria (1968) records that his subject memorized strings of items, even of nonsense, by placing each of them in some spot on a walk he would conduct in his head around a familiar place. As he walked, he would distribute the items around landmarks. He might place a pencil near a fence, a banner on a building, a shoe in a window. He could then recall them several years later. He evidently had some special freak of brain structure or activity that gave him the capacity to use place codes in far greater detail than is normal.
What we do in memorizing is to add to our set of programs of suitable actions. When we say that something becomes a symbol, we mean that it has acquired significance. Human beings have the power to continue
