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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.”
—Erma Brombeck (20th century)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)