Page 78 - Advanced Biblical Counseling Student Textbook

Automatic Processing
“Thanks to your brain’s capacity for simultaneous activity (for parallel processing), an enormous amount
of multitasking (doing more than one thing at the same time) goes on without your conscious attention.
For example, without conscious effort, you automatically process information about

1. Space. While studying, you often encode the place on a page where certain material appears; later,
when struggling to recall that information, you may visualize its location.

2. Time. While going about your day, you unintentionally note the sequence of the day’s events. Later,
when you realize you’ve left your coat somewhere, you can recreate that sequence and retrace your
steps.

3. Frequency. You effortlessly keep track of how many times things happen, thus enabling you to realize
“this is the third time I’ve seen her today.”

4. Well-learned information. For example, when you see words in your native language, perhaps on the
side of a delivery truck, you cannot help but register their meanings. At such times, automatic
processing is so effortless that it is difficult to shut it off.” 118

“When learning new information such as names, we can boost our memory through rehearsal, or
conscious repetition. Here are five different ways our brain encodes information:

Think of the list of five words I asked you to remember a few minutes ago. Say the five words without
looking back at the list. Which ones were the easiest to remember? Probably cigarette and fire because
they involve visual imagery. Avoid goes along with cigarette, so that has a connection too. Imagine and
process are the most difficult because they are abstract words.

Thanks to this durability of vivid images, our memory of an experience is often colored by its best or
worst moment – the best moment of pleasure or joy, and the worst moment of pain or frustration.
Recalling the high points while forgetting the boring may explain the phenomenon of rosy retrospection
when people tend to recall events more positively than they judged them at the time.” 119

Storage: Retaining Information

Stress Hormones and Memory
“Researchers interested in the biology of the mind have also looked closely at the influence of emotions
and stress on memory. When we are excited or stressed, emotion-triggered stress hormones make
more glucose energy available to fuel brain activity, signaling the brain that something important has
happened. Moreover, the amygdala, two emotion-processing clusters in the limbic system, boosts
activity and available proteins in the brain’s memory-forming area. The result? Arousal can sear certain
events into the brain, while disrupting memory for neutral events around the same time.

118 Ibid., p. 186.
119 Ibid., p. 187.

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