I forgot

I forgot. How many times has it happened to you? Forgetting is losing information that you once had. Yet it is still not clear whether our brain can forget. Let's see why.

Certainly, our life experience tells us that we have the actual sensation of forgetting, but research tells a slightly different story. To understand the reason, we need to keep two definitions in mind: encoding and retrieval. In simple terms, the encoding phase is how we learned something, and the retrieval phase is the recall of information we have studied or experienced.

Today, scientific research states that the only factor capable of significantly influencing memory recall is the way information was learned (encoding phase). So, what we call forgetting is our inability to access information in memory. Shall we give an example?

History quiz. Who was the first king of Rome? And you draw a blank. Then the teacher tries to give you some hints, taking a roundabout approach: "What is the symbol of Rome?" and you say, "The she-wolf," and she says, "Not just the she-wolf, but also two children," at that point, you remember the names of those two children (Romulus and Remus), and one of them was the first king of Rome. With a bit of luck, you'll give the right answer.

But what did the teacher do? Unconsciously, she exploited your encoding phase when you studied the kings of Rome. The word "Romulus" was close to another word "Remus," and these words were close to the word "she-wolf," which, in turn, is closely related to the word "Rome." So, even though you had forgotten (or couldn't recall), by using something called "encoding specificity," she facilitated your retrieval phase.

Let's see a different application? Are there any fans of police TV series here? If so, you may have seen an episode where a witness undergoes something called a cognitive interview. To facilitate the recall phase, the witness is taken to the physical location where the event occurred, so that the environment provides those cues that help retrieve the information from memory (similar to the history teacher).

What do you think? Have you ever experienced forgetting but then just a small hint was enough to remember?

If you want me to describe in my own words a topic of psychology, please request it in the comment section.

Cited sources: Tulving & Thompson (1973) - Encoding specificity and retrieval process in episodic process.