Page 296 - Understanding Psychology

Retrieving Information
Reader’s Guide
Exploring Psychology
What a Memory!
Rajan Mahadevan stood before the packed house of the International Congress on Yoga and Meditation. He recited, from memory, the first 30,000 digits of pi, which is often rounded off to two decimal points, or 3.14. He did not err until the 31,812th digit. This feat took 3 hours and 44 min- utes and earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. . . .
Rajan can repeat a string of 60 num- bers after a single hearing, while most of us can repeat an average of about seven random numbers. Rajan is one of only a half-dozen people in the world known to have such gargantuan memory powers.
Despite Rajan’s unbelievable ability to memorize numbers, he seems to be worse than average at recalling faces, and he constantly forgets where he put his keys.
—adapted from Introduction to Psychology by Rod Plotnik, 1996
s Main Idea
Stored memory can be retrieved by recognition, recall, and relearning.
s Vocabulary
• recognition
• recall
• reconstructive processes
• confabulation
• schemas
• eidetic memory
• decay
• interference
• elaborative rehearsal
• mnemonic devices
s Objectives
• Identify several memory retrieval
processes.
• Explain the processes involved in
forgetting.
The example above illustrates the brain’s tremendous capacity for storing and retrieving information. Stored information is useless unless it can be retrieved from memory. Once you have forgotten to send a card for your mother’s birthday, for example, it is not very con- soling to prove that you have the date filed away in your brain. We have all experienced the acute embarrassment of being unable to remember a close friend’s name. There are few things in life more frustrating than having a word “on the tip of your tongue” and not being able to remember it.
282 Chapter 10 / Memory and Thought