Tma01
- Submitted by: King
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- Category: Science
- Date Submitted: 07/04/2010 03:14 AM
- Pages: 5
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How can the way in which we organise our thinking by using mental images, concepts and schemas help us improve our memory?
Introduction:
To answer the question I will start by breaking it down into what I feel are its main parts,
• What is memory?
• What mental images are and how they help us improve our memory.
• What concepts are and how they help us improve our memory.
• What schemas are and how they help us improve our memory.
What is memory?
In order to have memory’s our brains must have plasticity. Plasticity is, as Spoors et al. (2007, P. 8) put it “the ability for the brain to change with learning and experience.”
If our brains could not change we would not be able to retain any information. For an analogy we could look at a computer’s hard drive. When we write or do some other type of information processing, for us to keep the information we must be able to save it. Saving the document to the hard disk physically changes the magnetic surface to read as thousands of 1’s and 0’s. If the surface of the disk could not change, all of the information would be lost when the computer was turned off. And, like a computer, to save information, or make memories and retain them, our brains must be able to change. So to define, memory is the processes that are used to store, retain and later retrieve information.
What mental images are and how they help us improve our memory.
The way think can be described in several different ways
• Semantic Thought- Internal Dialogue.
• Iconic Thought - Internal Imagery.
• Enactive Thought - Internal representation of movement.
So a mental image is an internally constructed picture. If you were asked to imagine, for example, what a pineapple looks like, what you would see in your mind is your mental image of a pineapple.
Spoors et al. (2007) suggests that most of our thinking is done semantically, thinking in words. But many experiments have been carried out that suggest that we remember information better if...
Introduction:
To answer the question I will start by breaking it down into what I feel are its main parts,
• What is memory?
• What mental images are and how they help us improve our memory.
• What concepts are and how they help us improve our memory.
• What schemas are and how they help us improve our memory.
What is memory?
In order to have memory’s our brains must have plasticity. Plasticity is, as Spoors et al. (2007, P. 8) put it “the ability for the brain to change with learning and experience.”
If our brains could not change we would not be able to retain any information. For an analogy we could look at a computer’s hard drive. When we write or do some other type of information processing, for us to keep the information we must be able to save it. Saving the document to the hard disk physically changes the magnetic surface to read as thousands of 1’s and 0’s. If the surface of the disk could not change, all of the information would be lost when the computer was turned off. And, like a computer, to save information, or make memories and retain them, our brains must be able to change. So to define, memory is the processes that are used to store, retain and later retrieve information.
What mental images are and how they help us improve our memory.
The way think can be described in several different ways
• Semantic Thought- Internal Dialogue.
• Iconic Thought - Internal Imagery.
• Enactive Thought - Internal representation of movement.
So a mental image is an internally constructed picture. If you were asked to imagine, for example, what a pineapple looks like, what you would see in your mind is your mental image of a pineapple.
Spoors et al. (2007) suggests that most of our thinking is done semantically, thinking in words. But many experiments have been carried out that suggest that we remember information better if...