Forgetfulness is the lack or failure of retention. In other words, inability of a learned topic to come to consciousness or to remember it, is the mental process of forgetfulness. This process is opposite to memory.
"Forgetfulness is the temporary or permanent loss of a previously acquired or learned subject or fact, or ability to recognize or remember an object." -English and English
"Failure to retain the acquired or to remember it, is forgetfulness." -M.N. Munn
"It defined that forgetting is an active Mental Process." -Woodworth
Forgetting
In 1967 Munn defines forgetting as the loss, permanent or temporary of the ability to recall or recognise something learned earlier. Some times what we think is forgotten in real sense is not forgetting because it has never been encoded and stored in the first place. Many student complain that they do not remember the contents after attending the class or forget after reading the text.
This is due to lack of attention. Some information does not reach STM from sensory register or due to inadequate encoding and rehearsal, the information may not have been transferred from STM to LTM.
Causes of Forgetting
1. Amount of learning, method, speed and effect of equipment.
2. Disuse.
3. Obstruction in feelings.
4. Use of intoxicating.
5. Changes in the condition of excitement.
6. Disease of brain or nervous system and shock.
7. Quality of subject matter.
8. Psychology factors
a. Lack of motives
:- Emotions conditions like anxiety, fear, depression, love etc.
:- Supression- pushing experience in the unconscious
b. Lack of interest in the topic.
Faulty Memory Process
Many times, we forget as memory does not match, events which had occur. This happens due to the constructive process, i.e. certain materials may be simplified or changes during encoding. We remember the gist or meaning of what we have read or heard, but not the actual words themselves.
Interference:-
Learning new things interfere with memory of things learned later:
1. Retroactive Inhibition:- This is a technical name of new learning interfering with material previously learned. This is a backward effect. An experimental design for the retroactive inhibition.
2. Proactive Inhibition:- When prior learning interfere with the learning and the recall of new material, it is proactive inhibition. This is a forward process.
Suppose you learn English then french you would find the study of English interfering with the recall of French due to proactive inhibition, i.e. interference with subsequent memory.
In both types of interference, it has been found that the effect of interference is less with meaningful material and after attaining some mastery in subject. Time tabling of lessons in various educational settings is designed to reduce forgetting due to interference, very non-similar subject follow each other:-
For example: In school, a language might follow mathematics, in colleges of nursing, political nursing then anatomy. At the beginning of your course, you should try to allot different study times to similar subjects to avoid interference.
Other Types of Interference
Forgetting occurs owing to several other types of interference like items in the STM interference with each other. Thus they are continually forgotten. One tends to remember items at the start of a list and the end of list better than items in the middle.
Items in the LTM interact with each other, old items can be distorted or changed by the new inputs.
Some inputs are rejected by the lower center of the brain because they are meaningless or unimportant while other inputs are deliberately repressed.
Encoding, Organisation and Retrieval Problems
If the stored information is not encoded well or organized at the time of learning, it is forgotten. Retrieval cues are important in memory as we may not be able to recall an information in one situation but may spontaneously remember in another situation. Retrieval is facilitated by organisation of the stored material and the presense of retrieval cues that can guide our search through LTM for stored information. In the absence of proper retrieval cues the desired items stored with LTM will not be found. You cannot recall somethings while activity searching for it but after giving up that search while doing something else, you recall that information. This is because your new activity has generated new retrieval cues.
Motivated Forgetting
Many lapses of memory in daily life are due to motivated forgetting. We may forget the names of people whom we hate. We forget to buy a particular edible item, which the housewife has asked to buy, probably because it is not to our liking. Repression theory holds that we forget because the retrieval of memories would be painful or unacceptable in some way.
Visitors to patients sometimes indulge in recollection of all the sad and unfortunate experiences which they remember suddenly when the association with hospital. Sickness and death brings those memories to the fore. Patients do not find stories of other people's suffering, operations, treatments and misfortunes at all comforting. Nurse may have to help visitors to remember positive, encourage and hopeful types of conversation by their own cheerful, optimistic attitude of visitors.
The patient may appear to forget his family and his work and may remember only the events which occur in the hospital. His conversation is about the words, the nurses, other patients. He appears to have forgotten his family. Children in the hospital show this to a very marked degree.
Emotional factors also play an important role in forgotten than pleasant experiences. Suppose in a particular class, you were scolded by instructor; you are likely to forget most of what was taught in that class that day. This is why punishment is not, in long run, effective in promoting learning.
Amnesia- Forgetting during sickness
Amnesia refers to loss of memory due to disease. The person may forget his past experience or may have impaired ability to encode, stored and to retrieve making new memory difficult. Amnesia is a profound memory, deficit due to either the loss of what has been stored or the inability to form new memories. Amnesia are classfied into two types Biological and Psychological.
Biological
Amnesia are caused by brain malfunctions: example are transient global amnesia, alcohol induced amnesia and the amnesia caused by certain disease of the brain. Transient global amnesia is a short-lived amnesia attack characterized by retrograde and auterograde amnesia High doses of alcohol result in amnesia for the events that occur while drunk. In addition, drinking over a period of year can produce brain damage and a pattern of system known as the korsakoff syndrome. Auterograde amnesia and some loss of remote memory characterizes the memory problems of this syndrome, Senile dementia and primary degenerative dementia, of which Alzheimer's disease is an example are instances of brain disease that have amnesia as major symptoms.
Psychological Amnesia
1. Childhood Amnesia:- It is due to the difference in the ways young children and older people encode and store information. As adult, much of our memory is encoded verbally and tied into networks or schemata that are language based. But the young child without language encodes memories in a non-verbal form, perhaps storing information as image or feelings. Early childhood memories are thus said to be stored in forms no longer available to us verbally as adults. Our language dominated memories do not have retrieval cues appropriate for gaining access to the images and feelings memories of early childhood. Perhaps the memory machine is just not able to store long term memories until its maturation is essentially finished. Language ability and memory develop together because both depends on brain maturation. Repression is another explanation given for childhood and dreams amnesia.
2. Dream Amnesia:- In dream amnesia, the difference between the symbol system in dreams and in waking makes the waling retrieval of any information encoded during dreaming difficult.
While usually considered to be psychological, childhood and dream amnesia have a biological basis. The immaturity of the brain in childhood amnesia and the difference between the brain states in dreaming and in waking for dream amnesia. The forgetting of defensive amnesia protects the amnesia from the guilt or anxiety that can accompany intense, intolerable life situation and conlflicts.
