Clive Wearing was playing the piano alone
in his room. When his wife came into the room, he immediately
leapt up and embraced her with joyful enthusiasm. A minute later, she slipped out to grab a
glass of water, and when she returned, he gave her that same bright greeting, as if
she’d been gone for days. And then he did again. And again. Clive was an accomplished London musician,
until, in 1985 at the age 47, he contracted a rare Herpes encephalitis virus that ravaged
his central nervous system. Since then he’s been unable to remember
almost any of his past, or to make any new memories. His wife is the only person he recognizes,
but he can never recall the last time he saw her. This may be the most profound case of extreme
and chronic amnesia ever recorded. Our memory helps make us who we are. Whether recognizing loved ones, recalling
past joys, or just remembering how to, like, walk and talk and fry an egg, memory is the
chain that connects our past to our present. If it breaks, we’re left untethered, incapable
of leaving the present moment, and unable to embrace the future. But memory isn’t an all or nothing thing,
of course. Wearing can’t remember any details about
his personal past, but he still remembers how to speak English, get dressed, and play
the piano. Some memories you process automatically, and
they are stored differently than your more personal or factual memories, like, your first
kiss, or how to recite pi to twelve places, or who won the Peloponnesian War. Speaking of ancient Greeks -- and to help
demonstrate what I’m talking about -- I want you to have a look at our Spartan friend
here, and remember his name. ‘Cause we’re gonna test your memory in
just minute. [INTRO] Technically, memory is learning that has persisted
over time -- information that has been stored and, in many cases, can be recalled. Except of course during the exam! Our memories are typically accessed in three
different ways — through recall, recognition, and relearning. And if you think about all the different kinds
of tests you’ve taken in school, they’re all actually designed to size up how you access
stored information in these ways. Like, recall is how you reach back in your
mind and bring up information, just as you do in fill-in-the-blank tests. So if i say, BLANK is the capital of Greece,
your brain would hopefully recall the answer as Athens. Recognition, meanwhile, is more like a multiple-choice
test -- you only need identify old information when presented with it. As in: which of the following was NOT an ancient
city in Greece: Athens, Marathon, Pompeii, or Sparta. And relearning is sort of like refreshing
or reinforcing old information. So when you study for a final exam, you relearn
things you half-forgot more easily than you did when you were first learning them, like,
say, a basic timeline of the Greek empire. But how? How does all of that data that we’re exposed
to, all the time, every day, become memory? Well, in the late 1960s, American psychologists
Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin figured out enough about the process of memory-formation
to break it down into three stages: First, it’s first encoded into brain, then
stored for future use, and then eventually retrieved. Sounds simple, but by now you’ve figured
out that, just because you take a lot of stuff about your mind for granted, that doesn’t
mean it isn’t complicated. By Atkinson and Shiffrin’s model, we first
record things we want to remember as an immediate, but fleeting, sensory memory. Think back to the image I showed you a minute
ago. Do you remember his name? If you do it’s because you successfully
managed to shuffle it into your short-term memory, where you probably encoded it through
rehearsal. This is how you briefly remember something
like a password or phone number-- hey Tommy, what’s Jenny’s number? Okay. 867-5309...867-5309… 8-6-7-5-3… see you’re
getting it in your head there. Or in this case, I told you to remember that
guy’s name, so maybe you were thinking “Leonidas” repeatedly over and over, even if you didn’t
think you were doing it. But this information really only stays in
your short-term memory for under thirty seconds without a lot of rehearsal. So if you weren’t repeating “Leonidas,”
you’d probably have forgotten it already. Because your mind, amazing as it is, can really
only hold between four to seven distinct bits of information at a time--at which point,
the memory either decays, or gets transferred into long-term memory. Long-term memory is like your brain’s durable
and ridiculously spacious storage unit, holding all your knowledge, skills, and experiences. Now, since the days of Atkinson and Shiffrin,
psychologists have recognized that the classical definition of short-term memory didn’t really
capture all of the processes involved in the transfer of information to your long-term
memory. I mean, it’s more than just being able to
remember some Greek guy’s name. So later generations of psychologists revisited
the whole idea of short-term memory and updated it to the more comprehensive concept of working
memory. Working memory involves all the ways that
we take short-term information and stash it in our long-term stores. And increasingly, we think of it as involving
both explicit and implicit processes. When we store information consciously and
actively, that’s an explicit process. We make the most of this aspect of working
memory when we study, for instance, so that we can know that Athens is the capital of
Greece, and that Pompeii was a Roman town, and not a Greek one. This is how we capture facts and knowledge
that we think we’re going to need -- like I told you specifically to remember Leonidas’
name, you concentrated on that detail and filed it away, if briefly. But of course we’re not conscious of Every. Tiny. Thing that we take in. Yet, our working memory often transfers stuff
we’re not aware of to long-term storage. We call that an implicit process, the kind
you don’t have to actively concentrate on. A good example might be classically conditioned
associations, like, if you get all sweaty and nervous at the dentist because you had
a root canal last year. You don’t need to pull up that file on the
last time you got your face drilled to think oh hey, oral surgery! Not my favorite! Instead, implicit processes cover all that
stuff automatically. This kind of automatic processing is hard
to shut off-- unless you’ve got something unusual going on in your brain, you may not
have much choice but to learn this way, like how you learned how to not put your hand into
a fire. That learning would have happened pretty much
automatically as soon as you first yanked your hand away from an open flame. Whether things are lodged in there explicitly
or implicitly, or both, there are also different kinds of long-term memory. For instance, procedural memory refers to
how we remember to do things -- like riding a bike or reading - it’s effortful to learn
at first, but eventually you can do it without thinking about it. Long-term memory can also be episodic, tied
to specific episodes of your life -- like “remember that time that Bernice fell out
of her chair in chemistry lab and started laughing uncontrollably?” Man, good times. There are other types of long-term memory,
too, and we’re continually learning more about the biology and psychology of the whole
complex phenomenon. For instance, while Clive Wearing’s episodic
memories (among others) seem to be deeply affected, his procedural memories for things
seems to be in one piece. This has to do with neuroanatomy that we don’t
have time to explore here, and that we don’t yet fully understand -- Wearing and others
have a lot to teach us about the different types of long-term memory storage. Now, for healthy memories, there are lots
of little tricks you can use to help remember information. Mnemonics, for one, help with memorization,
and I’m sure you know a few that take the form of acronyms--ROY G. BIV for the colors
of the rainbow, for instance. Mnemonics work in part by organizing items
into familiar, manageable units, in a process called chunking. For example, it may be hard to recall a seven-digit
number, but it’ll be easier to commit it to memory in the rhythm of a phone number:
867-5309. Or you could just, you know, write a song
about it. Strategies like mnemonics and chunking can
help you with explicit processing, but how well you retain your data can depend on how
deep you dig through the different levels of processing. Shallow processing, for instance, lets you
encode information on really basic auditory or visual levels, based on the sound, structure
or appearance of a word. So if you’re trying to commit the name Leonidas
to your explicit memory, using shallow processing you might encode the word by recalling the
cool font you saw it in. But to really retain that information, you’d
want to activate your deep processing, which encodes semantically, based on actual meaning
associated with the word. In this case, you might remember the story
of the mega-tough yet very scantily clad warrior of ancient Greece. Or you might remember that “leon” means
“lion” in Greek, that lions are tough fighters, and that Leonidas was a tough Spartan
warrior-king. And then to really, really make it stick,
you want to connect it to something meaningful or related to your own personal, emotional
experience. Like maybe Gerard Butler’s bronzed eight-pack
torso and unconquerable blood-lust helped lock down the words Spartan and Leonidas in
your forever memory. I mean, maybe. If … if that helps you. In the end, how much information you encode
and remember depends on both the time you took to learn it and how you made it personally
relevant to YOU. Memory is extremely powerful. It’s constantly shaping and reshaping your
brain, your life, and your identity. Clive Wearing is still himself on the outside,
but in his inability to recall who he was, or process what has happened, he has lost
some critically important part of himself. Our memories may haunt us or sustain us, but
either way, they define us. Without them, we are left to wander alone
in the dark. If you were committing this lesson to memory,
you learned about how we encode and store memory, the difference between implicit automatic
and effortful explicit processing, how shallow and deep processing work, and a few types
of long-term storage. Thanks for watching, especially to our Subbable
subscribers, who make this whole channel possible. If you’d like to sponsor an episode of Crash
Course, get a special Laptop Decal, or even be animated into an upcoming episode, just
go to Subable.com/crashcourse. This episode was written by Kathleen Yale,
edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat. Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins,
the script supervisor is Michael Aranda, who’s also our sound designer, and the graphics
team is Thought Café.