Without memories of the past, we couldn’t operate in the present or think about the future — we couldn’t learn new things, or make future plans, or recite all of the Rock’s rap from Moana (honestly, I could go on and on…). The world only makes sense because we can remember what things mean. What is language without memory?
And our memory isn’t perfect. For example, if we are distracted while something is happening we might not encode information properly, and find it difficult to recall what happened when we want to remember it.
In this zone you’ll meet one psychologist studying the theory of control, a psychology lecturer interested in the brain mechanisms that help us forget things and a bio-psychologist who wants to understand how animals think and behave. There’s also a psychologist studying the brain to understand and improve classroom learning, another interested in why some people with dementia don’t get the help they need, and another investigating the influence of sleep on memory and the human mind.
