Why Do We Forget - Essay Example

Retrograde is the category of amnesia where an individual is unable to remember previous contents stored in the memory (Pastorino & Doyle-Portillo, 2015). The other category of amnesia is anterograde, which is a category of amnesia where an individual cannot interpret any new content into the long-term memory.The various causes of amnesia include head trauma resulting from an injury, health conditions like brain tumors, strokes, an excess of an insulin dose, and many more (Rohkamm, 2011). These conditions inhibit a section or the entire process of information retrieval from the long-term memory.

In their study Graf & Masson (2013), an evaluation of amnesia is on basis of two approaches. For instance, the unsuccessful fortification causes all the recently acquired content at one instance to encounter poor encoding into the long-term memory. Similarly, they argue there are effects that can trigger the remembrance of the previous information in the memory but then this trigger is only applicable to solely past content but not what has presently ensued (Graf & Masson, 2013). Various theorists contend there are cases of amnesia that results from designing the distorted processes that inhibit the combination of new content in the memory (Graf & Masson, 2013)Another class of theories describes that although some attributes of amnesia are due to unsuccessful combination and representation of new content, they further argue that not every new contented result in unsuccessful consolidation (Graf & Masson, 2013)The theory is on the basis of the concept of interpretation and presentation which states that the context or suggestion given when certain information was learned, helps in remembrance later otherwise if the suggestion given is misguiding, then a person tends to forget (Pastorino & Doyle-Portillo, 2015).

This type of forgetting is very common in the real-life context.Godden and Baddeley (1975) in their experiment involving members of the swimming club, memorized a list of words whereby one group learned the words on the beach while the other memorized while underwater. Later, the two groups interchanged and the results were that each group recalled the words better while the original place where they crammed the words.