Activity 5.1: Warm-up: Long-term memory and retrieval

I spent many a late Saturday night with Father Guido.  During our time together, Father Guido got a lot of his commentary right.  But I think he may have missed something with his “Five Minute University.”  Education is more the recall of facts and platitudes.  It is the ingestion and manipulation of information to incorporate said information in to a larger personal databank.  In this schema, I posit that every activity we participate in has an effect.    Every activity has “burned” a pathway into our brain.    Whether these activities can be verbalized, actively recalled or not, they have had some effect on our development.

To this end, learning is quite dependent on memory. Without effective memory how can one organize or recall what has proceeded?  Without memory, we would quite possibly spend a lifetime reconstructing past experiences and repeating them.   We would never make any progress or perhaps not even survive one day of childhood.  In fact it may be argued that human existence and progression may not exist without the role of memory and its effects on the learning process.