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62 Deception at Work

Table 3.4 Types of memory

Type of memory Function Examples

AREA OF THE BRAIN IN WHICH STORED

12 3

Procedural How to perform tasks How to ride a bicycle or drive a car
CEREBELLUM AND PUTAMEN How to get home from work

Semantic Relating to ideas and concepts Recognizing different colours
Episodic CORTICAL AREAS AND TEMPORAL Feelings and emotions
Emotional LOBE Shapes and colours
Relationships

Relating to events, people, facts and Birth dates of your children
learning What you did last week
ENCODED BY THE HIPPOCAMPUS AND What someone told you yesterday
STORED IN CORTICAL AREAS Your last annual appraisal

Emotional experiences Stored in the amygdala and very
Amygdala in the LIMBIC SYSTEM difficult to forget

mally hold between five and nine topic-related chunks, after which it becomes overloaded
and either throws the excess into the waste bin or files it for the long term. Each experience is
encoded in chunks in different parts of the brain and can be considered to be a highly com-
plicated relational database.

We can, of course, override the unconscious processing of memory and make a conscious
decision to remember something such as an important telephone number, name or date.
We may make a note to remind us, but the irony is that when we do this, our subconscious
reminds us at the appropriate time and we never have to refer to the note. Similarly, if we set
our alarm clock to wake us for work particularly early, our subconscious will wake us up every
90 minutes throughout the night.

You can never forget something you really want to remember

Episodic memory (relating to people, places events etc.) is the most short-term and tran-
sient. Some input is consciously or subconsciously flagged as important and is retained in
long-term memory: unimportant matters are not flagged and recollection quickly degrades.

Other inputs may not be consciously flagged on being laid into memory but still can be
quickly retrieved when prompted by a cue. For example, the cue of ‘What were you doing on 11
September 2001?’ will undoubtedly remind you where you were and what you were doing,
mainly because of the emotion involved and the scale of the visual impact. The cue of 18
February 2002, may not have the same effect unless, of course, it was your wife’s birthday and
you forgot it and found your supper in the dog rather than in the oven.

The more handles, or cues, there are, the easier it is to remember