History
The study of human memory stretches back over the last 2000 years. An early attempt to understand memory can be found in Aristotle’s major treatise, On the Soul, in which he compares the human mind to a blank slate. He theorized that all humans are born free of any knowledge and are the sum of their experiences. It wasn’t until the late 1800s, however, that a young German philosopher by the name of Herman Ebbinghaus developed the first scientific approach to studying memory. While some of his findings have endured and remain relevant to this day (Learning Curve), his greatest contribution to the field of memory research was demonstrating that memory can be studied scientifically. In 1972, Endel Tulving proposed the distinction between episodic and semantic memory. This was quickly adopted and is now widely accepted. Following this, in 1985, Daniel Schacter proposed a more general distinction between explicit (declarative) and implicit (procedural) memory With the recent advances in neuroimaging technology, there have been a multitude of findings linking specific brain areas to declarative memory. Despite these advances in Cognitive psychology, there is still much to be discovered in terms of the operating mechanisms of declarative memory. It is unclear whether declarative memory is mediated by a particular “memory system” or if it is more accurately classified as a “type of knowledge” and it is not known how or why declarative memory evolved to begin with.
Read more about this topic: Declarative Memory
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This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
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“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
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“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
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