Teddy Nadler was not alone. There is a famous (and fascinating) case study of a mnemonist written by the noted Russian neuroscientist, Alexander Luria (Luria, 1987). His mnemonist, like Nadler, never forgot anything. And this man led a horrible life. It seems that if one’s mind is filled with details and facts, then it becomes very difficult concentrate on anything or to establish meaningful relationships with other people – or simply to find any pattern or meaning in one’s life. Our capacity to forget is one of the most important and adaptive features in our brain. Mother nature got it right when she drew up plans for us to actively select out memories from our daily life during the time when we are asleep.
Our Memory’s Dance with the Internet
We are now ready to introduce a new character into this dance that we are choreographing. This new character is the Internet. This new character has a major impact on the way we assimilate and accommodate, on the way in which we engage procedural and declarative memory, and on the way in which we remember and forget. Let’s first consider assimilation and accommodation.
The Internet of Accommodation
Unlike human beings, the Internet tends to accept new information without trying to fit it in with what the Internet already knows. While material on the Internet can be modified (such as occurs with Wikipedia), it tends to be just a source of storage rather than a source of interpretation.
Many years ago, it was thought that the information we take in is stored as specific, discrete packets (called “engrams”). A famous neuroscientist, Karl Lashley (1950), went searching for the engram—but couldn’t find it. Rather, he (and other neuroscientists) began to realize that memory is much more complex and constructive. There is no memory bank where specific information is stored. In fact, we reconstruct the memory when seeking to retrieve it.
This act of reconstruction (rather than passive retrieval) has led us to a greater appreciation of the assimilative process and to a recognition that accommodation never occurs in isolation from assimilation: we never can recover the original, non-modified memory. Even traumatic events (the so-called “light bulb” events such as the assignation of President Kennedy, collapse of the towers, or more pleasantly the marriage of our child) are never recalled in their original form—though they are often more readily retrieved and less often forgotten than more trivial events.
