James (1899) wrote “There can be no improvement of the
general or elementary faculty of memory: there can only be improvement of our
memory for the special systems of associated things…” In this passage, James is arguing that we
humans are born with all our memory making capacity at birth. Thoughts, observations, and ideas go in and
do not get out. No outside agent will change this. Perhaps science will create something in the
next few decades to rival the human brain, but it is not here yet.
James does offer hope regarding what we can retrieve. Retrieval is based on the associations that
are built when new information is encountered. To have as many associations as possible,
one needs to experience as much as possible. The experience can happen via first person,
second person, or more removed-person interactions. We can learn from the mistakes of others, as
the adage says. But these lessons and
associations are much stronger if we experience them ourselves.
In the library world, this association making is the root of
Information Literacy. Personal
experience and readings provided to the new librarian stress that students
retain more information if the instruction is tied to an imminent
assignment. Students remember where a
particular information source lies and how to access it because the need is
there. They have taken the lesson and
made a crucial association to their own experience and processed something for
later recall.
This leads to a question that has been puzzling since the
start of class. Where does formal learning
occur? Does it only occur in the formal
classroom? Or is all of life a class?
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