Four types of human memory and your mobile

Posted on August 27, 2012

0



I was reading about types of memory last night and it occurred to me that these have analogies in the way we use our mobile phones.
The states of memory were laid out by Bruce D. Perry MD, and we’re used in a book I was reading.
This I feeds into my thoughts that we are at a turning point in human history, the way we interact, think, behave is all changing beyond recognition compared to the time before mobile, is that BM rather than BC for dates, I set the BM date to be 2000 ;)
Here we go, first up is Cognitive memory
This is our memory that has immediate recall and stores facts, figures, history, names etc.
You know the stuff you use all the time.
This, it seems to me, is the working files part of my mobile, where I store my work.
I keep a lot of this stuff in the cloud so I can recall it from any device that I need to (except client confidential stuff of course).
More than this though this it is analogous to Evernote, which is the service I use to store notes, in particular to aid my short term memory

Tied together with cognitive memory is Emotional Memory according to the book there is an emotional memory attached to every cognitive memory. With the emotional memory you may not be able to recall some or all of the cognitive, eg you may remember a school chum and roughly what they looked like, but not their name etc. however the emotion is still there you can still recall they were a friend.

This is the text, email and IM which stores my memories of emotion. These contain all of the emotions, love, despair, hope, exasperation etc. And for that matter messages are now an integral part of the running of my life thus for all the things that matter there are messages to match.

Another memory is Motor Memory which remember how to run your body, keeping you alive, and allowing you to drive, walk, and al that other schtuff you do with your body.

So I am thinking this is a combination of my diary which remembers where I need to be and the navigation tools. This way I know where and when I need to be. I like google’s tracks app as you can record a walk or trip. And geotagging pictures is a brilliant way of recording the ways of your life, even good note taking apps will geotag too.

State Memoryis that which is all about your personality traits. It is part of your deep responses like flight or fight. Mostly these are not recalled directly, but is the memory behind many of your decision making processes.

I have decided this is represented with your apps on the phone. These reflect your personality, do you have lots of frivolous apps, apps to organise your life, or info laden reference apps ? You see the apps you have are a brilliant measure of your personality. Even a lack of apps is indicative, as is whether you pay for them or not.

So your mobile and uses of it, the configuration of it, match quite well to how we use memory.

What do you think ?

Advertisement
Posted in: life, mobile