When I first saw this in the anime “Hikaru no Go”, I thought it was fiction. But masters of Go really can remember hundreds or thousands of games, and can stop in the middle of a game and resume it later in their life. So why can’t I remember a word for five minutes without repeating it?
I am slowly making my way through the JLPT N5 vocabulary on Memrise. While I am learning faster than I am forgetting – at least for now – the margin seems entirely too narrow. Shouldn’t forgetting be reserved for things we know we are unlikely to meet again, like a phone number called only once?
Scientists assure us that there are more connections in the human brain than there are atoms in the observable universe. Furthermore: Poking around in a patient’s brain with electrodes for some other purpose, the doctors accidentally woke to life memories from the distant past, in lifelike detail. So it seems we wander around with a library of a million books, but only a thousand of them are indexed. Why? Why do we forget? What’s in it for us?
***
Forgetfulness could just be a not-so-intelligent design, of course. My previous main computer had 4 GB of RAM, but 32-bit Windows could only access 3.25 GB. Even if I had doubled the computer’s memory, it would have been useless, because the limitation was elsewhere. So it is thinkable that our brains have enormous vaults of storage but the retrieval system can only handle a small fraction of it. When I refer to this as unintelligent design, it is because brains are expensive. The human brain uses a disproportionate amount of the body’s energy, somewhere in the range of 20-25% despite its limited size. The brain of the Peking Man would be plenty enough to store the memories we can recall after a long and eventful life. Probably an Australopithecus as well.
As if to further confuse us, there are a few scattered individuals who can remember pretty much anything. You can give them a long list of random numbers or syllables, which most of us would not be able to recite even right after hearing it; a year later, they will recall it perfectly with only a slight pause. Occasionally someone seems to be born this way, while others have found some system or practice that lets them remember anything. Several of the latter have written books in which they try to teach how to do it. But despite the widespread sale of such books, humankind has not been transformed into their likeness. I am still not surrounded by mnemonic supermen, to put it mildly.
On further inspection, it turns out that memory masters – at least those not born that way – can remember anything, but not everything. That is to say, memorizing random data requires intense concentration, and also deliberate practice beforehand building up the memorizing skill. So the lunch is not quite free after all. We are simply not made to remember our whole life in full 3D color vision and surround sound. Perhaps just as well: If we remembered everything, nothing would stand out. As one Amazon reviewer put it: If life is defined by the moments that take our breath away, holding your breath is just not the same!
In addition to the general memorizing ability, there are many professions and arts that have impressive but specific memories. I have mentioned high-level Go players, who can remember every game in their career move by move. Considering that there are more possible Go games to play than there are stars in the galaxies, this is quite uncanny. But they still need a list to remember their groceries. The deliberate practice of their craft creates a mental model that interacts directly with long-term memory, without going through the usual channel of recalling item by item into short-term memory. This is perhaps similar to how we learn “wordless” skills such as biking, which involve many muscles and senses. Decades later, we can resume where we left off, without any conscious effort to “recall” how we did it.
Learning to speak in the first instance is also a pretty intense practice, and usually involves not only a steady effort from the toddler but also from the surrounding family, which acts selectively on meaningful words before the child even knows their meaning. I could also learn Japanese if I lived with a Japanese family that thought I was the most interesting thing since the world was made. ^_^ But as adults we just have to provide both sides of the learning enthusiasm ourselves.
Once we have learned to talk, we never forget how to do it. (If anything, we forget to not speak.) When there is a particular word we can’t recall, the reason is not forgetting but a psychological block. (For instance, a struggling alcoholic may have trouble with the word “bottle” because the very thought of a bottle sets off a fierce battle in his subconscious.) Only when Alzheimer’s or some such illness unravels the fabric of the mind do the words eventually fail us.
I conclude from all this that the natural “garbage collection” of the brain will take away my Japanese vocabulary unless I manage to grow it to a level where it stops being data points and becomes a skill. My plan is to give some priority to drilling basic vocabulary and reading hiragana until I reach the level where I can actually read Japanese manga (comics) in the native language. Comics tend to have a simpler and more limited vocabulary and grammar compared to articles and books. If I can sustain my deliberate practice until I have the skill of reading manga, I should be able reach a “safe haven” against forgetting. We forget data points, but we don’t easily forget skills. That’s just how our minds work, and it is always easier to ride the horse the way it wants to go anyway.