Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
Watch this video for Lesley Stahl’s 60 Minutes segment on this case.
The two subjects of this chapter are memory, defined as the ability to store and retrieve
information over time, and cognition, defined as the processes of acquiring and using knowledge.
It is useful to consider memory and cognition in the same chapter because they work together to
help us interpret and understand our environments.
Memory and cognition represent the two major interests of cognitive psychologists. The
cognitive approach became the most important school of psychology during the 1960s, and the
field of psychology has remained in large part cognitive since that time. The cognitive school
was influenced in large part by the development of the electronic computer, and although the
differences between computers and the human mind are vast, cognitive psychologists have used
the computer as a model for understanding the workings of the mind.
Differences between Brains and Computers
- In computers, information can be accessed only if one knows the exact location of the memory. In the brain,
information can be accessed through spreading activation from closely related concepts. - The brain operates primarily in parallel, meaning that it is multitasking on many different actions at the same
time. Although this is changing as new computers are developed, most computers are primarily serial—they
finish one task before they start another. - In computers, short-term (random-access) memory is a subset of long-term (read-only) memory. In the brain,
the processes of short-term memory and long-term memory are distinct. - In the brain, there is no difference between hardware (the mechanical aspects of the computer) and software (the
programs that run on the hardware). - In the brain, synapses, which operate using an electrochemical process, are much slower but also vastly more
complex and useful than the transistors used by computers. - Computers differentiate memory (e.g., the hard drive) from processing (the central processing unit), but in brains
there is no such distinction. In the brain (but not in computers) existing memory is used to interpret and store
incoming information, and retrieving information from memory changes the memory itself. - The brain is self-organizing and self-repairing, but computers are not. If a person suffers a stroke, neural
plasticity will help him or her recover. If we drop our laptop and it breaks, it cannot fix itself.