On many occasions I have heard people spew their beliefs that permanent memory is…permanent. That everything we learn is etched into “stone” in our brains. When we wish to remember an event, experience or information we simply ‘play back’ the information or experience like a DVD would. Well, if this was the case, why do we forget more often than we actually remember?

Sigmund Freud, a pioneer in the field of psychology, believed that everything we learn and experience is never forgotten. Somehow our subconscious ‘remembers’ everything even if our conscious does not. This could result in physical manifestations of our subconscious memories. An example of this would be forgetting that you were bitten by a dog but every time you see a dog you manifest symptoms of anxiety and fear.

So then, what is permanent memory if it is not permanent?

Experiencing something and learning information does require the storing of this information into what we call the ‘permanent memory’. Sometimes this information is easily forgotten because it was never encoded strongly enough from the working memory into the permanent memory. Sometimes the information is overwritten by new information and finally, sometimes the encoding was faulty to begin with. This can be related to installing a new program onto your computer to find that the program doesn’t work. You might need to reinstall the program meaning you may need to relearn the information making sure the encoding progress works and is strong.

So, just because you read a textbook once, or saw that phone number on a wall and recited it a couple of times, does not ensure you will remember this information later on. There is no proof that all information that we learn is stored “somewhere” in our brain and that if we think about it hard enough we will remember it. I have fallen into this trap many a times; sitting at a desk writing a test saying “I know I read this! It’s somewhere in the chaos of my mind!” Fact is, this is not true. It is very rare that I have remembered any information this way.

Experiences and information have been proven to shape our behavior however. As with the example of being bitten by the dog. Our behavior has changed for reasons that may be unknown. This is what psychologists call learning.

image via Flickr