Summary Of The Great Forgetting

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Have you ever forgot something, but you never knew you forgot it? Like it just slipped your mind and instead of going somewhere that you can remember, it dies in a bottomless pit. Your parents remember and your older siblings remember, but you do not. You were too young to remember it. Completely normal, everyone has gone through this. Astronauts, great philosophers, and even celebrities have gone through this. Kristen Ohlson, a freelance writer who has written several books and articles, wrote about this in her article the great forgetting. Ohlson starts the article with a question. Asking why we do not remember anything from our childhood in an artistic manner. “Our first three years are usually a blur and we don’t remember much before …show more content…

The first one was that kids lack the machinery for this. A lot of things have to be put to a motion for a memory to be created in the brain. Another one is that kids lack any kind narrative or vocab to describe an event. Kids also go through shredding or neurogenesis. Neurogenesis is the process of making new neurons and this can disrupt circuits in the brain that make them forget things. Also, it is easy for kids to get their memories mixed up with other people’s memories if it’s similar to an existing memory. The author gives a good example of this situation. “For instance, you meet someone and remember their name, but later meet a second person with a similar name, and become confused about the name of the first person.” As the kids grow up their memory does get better and it becomes less likely for their memory to succumb to these things. Something the author only slightly mentions is her interview with another psychologist named Patricia Bauer. She describes memory like making Jell-O. You take the mixture of Jell-O; pour it into a mold and put it in the refrigerator. The thing about the mold is that it has a hole and all you can hope that it solidifies in the mold before too much of it leaks

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