Intro to conscious and unconscious memory

Unconscious memory

Most scientists agree that unconscious memorizing is a process when one does not make any efforts and does not have a conscious goal to remember the material. Colorful, sharp, new and unusual objects attract our attention attention and can unconsciously stay in our memory. Knowing this a teacher can take advantage of it and help a child to remember some specific material unconsciously. The efficiency of the method, of course, depends on each individual as our experience of life is different. One can only remember something if it is repeated a lot of times. You can easily remember route that you go to work or all the objects on the way to a shop, because you take the route quite often. 

We firstly remember things that we work with and those that are target of our activities. This is where pictures come into play. It is an important part of educating our speech, thinking, memory and imagination. The richer our activity with certain material is, the better unconscious memorizing is. 

Our memory is of selective nature: we better remember things that are interesting and important for us. When kids try to solve cognitive and other similar tasks they experience the joy of finding, knowing and being busy. Therefore, it is crucial to develop curious and inquisitive mind. Interest not only helps to do work well, but it also improves results of unconscious memorizing. 

It is obvious that at an early age children remember a lot of information in this way. People do not understand how kids learn the language without studying grammar or going to school. It is done by means of unconscious memory. 

Conscious memory

Besides training unconscious memory we should be concerned with the development of our conscious memory too. Our schools should be ready to face the challenge and take advantage of time when children start developing conscious understanding, ability to observe things, conscious attention to things and forms of conscious memory. Learning at school requires a lot of efforts and not knowing how to remember has impact on progress of studies and attitude towards learning as a whole. 

It is believed that conscious memory is activity with specific purpose of remembering by specific ways and methods. Conscious memory is memorization of certain objects when a person has a purpose to remember. Development of this type of memory starts from conscious recall, which is followed by conscious memorization. Necessity to remember and recall arises from failures to do so and we start setting goals for ourselves from early childhood to remember and to do it well. 

There are two ways of conscious memorizing: mechanical and logical. 

Mechanical is when we repeat things a lot of times without trying to understand the essence and meanings of things. We simply understand exterior connections among objects. That’s why we can remember words of those, even though we do not understand the meaning of those words. We often tend to use this kind of memorization technique when we fail to understand the subject we are studying. That’s how we form to learn things mechanically. I mention this thing in my post on memory improvement tips. We should move from this kind of learning things and try to develop more advanced thinking skills.

We should never see memory as some inborn quality that we either have or we don’t. We all have it, but not all of us use it. Perfection of logical memory does not come easy. It comes with time and a lot of efforts on our part. We can improve it. And it starts when we make a decision to do it.