M

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M

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R

Y
How do we know through memory? ​Can we know things which are beyond our personal present experience?
​Is eyewitness testimony a reliable source of evidence? Can our beliefs contaminate our memory?

ACTIVITY

Read the following words. You will have one minute to memorize them and write them down on a piece of paper. 

plane
flower
picture
book
phone
hat
pancakes
plant
basil
​baseball
shoe
pen
red
silver
document
glasses
chocolate
sun
television
​lightbulb 

THE MIND PALACE 

The Method of Loci

  • Loci is a latin word for place
  • A myth claims that it was invented by the greek poet Simonides
  • It requires storing the words in different places in a familiar setting
  • It helps if you create a story to go along with the storage (in the case of remembering concepts and words in order)
  • It also helps if you provide vivid attributes to these words or concepts. 

MEMORY IN TOK

Many discussions of knowledge tend to focus on how beliefs and knowledge are formed rather than on how they are remembered by the individual. However, most of the knowledge that individuals have is in the form of memory and therefore how we retain information and how past events and experiences are reconstructed is an important aspect of how personal knowledge is formed. 

Memory, and particularly habit, has a strong link to procedural knowledge and remembering how to perform actions. In contrast to perception, memory refers to things which are not currently happening. And in contrast to imagination, memory refers to things which we believe really happened. Some would argue that memory is not itself a source of knowledge, but instead is a process which we use to recall knowledge gained in the past. However, although memory refers to knowledge gained in the past, it can be argued that even new knowledge is dependent on and influenced by memory. For example, how we interpret new situations can be heavily influenced by experience and previous events. In this way, apart from being a “storage unit” for existing knowledge, memory can also be a mechanism that allows us to process new and unique situations.
​
The importance of memory can be highlighted by imagining the challenges that would be presented by losing our memory. Because so much of our personal knowledge is in the form of memory, issues surrounding the reliability of memory are also crucial. Memory retrieval is often regarded as unreliable, for example, because it is seen to be subjective or heavily influenced by emotion. However, we rely on our memory every day and because many of our memories seem to be reliable, this gives us confidence that our other memories are reliable.

TOK Guide 2015

DA: It's time to test your memory again. Write down everything you remember from today's lesson about the concept of memory. 

PAY ATTENTION

CATEGORIES OF MEMORY

MODELS OF MEMORY

The Levels of Processing by Craik and Lockhart (1972)

ACTIVITY

1. Step outside with your camera. 
2. READ THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE: "What smartphone photography is doing to our memories" 
​3. Write a summary of the problem presented in the article with at least two pieces of research presented. 
4. Create a knowledge claim based on the article. 
5. Formulate a knowledge question. 

THE PROBLEM WITH MEMORY

​Is eyewitness testimony a reliable source of evidence?
How can memory be disrupted according to Loftus?
What other problems can interfere with memory formation or retrieval?
"Nearly two decades of research on memory distortion leaves no doubt that memory can be altered via suggestion. People can be led to remember their past in different ways, and they even can be led to remember entire events that never actually happened to them. When theese sorts of distortions occur, people are sometimees confident in their distorted or false memories, and often go on to desscribe the pseudomemories in substantial detail. These findings shed light on casees in which false memories are fervently held- as in when people remember things that are biologically or geographically impossible. The findings do not, however, give us the ability to reliably distinguish between real and false memories, ofr without independent corroboration, such distinctions are generally not possible."
                                                                                                                            http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/loftus.mem.html

COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND IDENTITY

To what extent can collective memory shape identity?

Use a RLS to help you answer this question.