Memory (Part 5)

Van Ormer goes along with this. He explains that sleeping after studying gives best results because of the absence of the inhibition or obliteration of the learned material by the waking activity.

He theorizes that another factor enters into it, that it is possible that the waking activity not only inhibits and obliterates what has been learned, but that it also prevents or holds in check a preservation or consolidation process which continues for a while in the nervous system after the impression of the learned material.

This preservation or consolidation process may often be at its highest point for the first part of the hour following learning. He suggests that it is also possible that the process of waking and the activity that takes place before there is any relearning is inhibitory as well. Still, he points out, results show there is a preservative process.

Van Ormer offers the explanation that perhaps recall is benefited by the refreshing effect of sleep on the organism, but notes that the same results were achieved whether the subject slept one hour or eight hours. Moreover, the results were the same one hour after the study period regardless of whether the hour was spent sleeping or waking.

The results suggested, on the whole, that a primary factor in forgetting is the action of the interpolated activity, because it inhibits a consolidation or preservation process and produces inhibition and obliteration of learned material. Retention was, for the most part, better after four or eight hours of sleep than after the same time interval of waking.

Little is forgotten during sleep. This appears to be an argument in favor of late night study, and perhaps also in favor of "cramming" before examinations.

A. E. Wagner conducted one of the early experiments "to determine the number of repetitions necessary to memorize and retain with maximum certainty a miscellaneous collection of facts." He noted the effectiveness of Jesuit methods of thorough and repeated drill and was thus inspired to study the value of frequent repetition.

He concluded that it was best to employ a relatively small number of repetitions with a constantly increasing interval of time between the repetitions, continuing over a rather long time period. His results showed that high school students, on the average, needed six repetitions (of his selected miscellaneous facts), and grade school students averaged about seven repetitions.

The physiological explanation of memory generally accepted today is that everything we experience or learn produces some physical change in the brain, leaves some kind of a trace, sometimes called an engram.*

Weinland suggests that the memory trace may be a lowering of the resistance to passage of the nervous impulse from one cell to another, so that the next impulse passes across more easily.

We have already discussed Thorndike's laws of learning, which state the importance of motivation, repetition, reward and meaningfulness; and the Gestalt emphasis on the whole, the meaningful configuration (Weinland points out a danger of inaccuracy with regard to detail in the Gestalt principle).

* The communication system between the cells of the nervous system is the physical basis of the association of ideas in the brain. Brain injury, lobotomy, or disease of the brain have been shown to affect certain areas of the brain, but not all.