Roger Brown's theory of memory

March 30, 2024

What were you doing when the man reached the moon? And when did the Berlin Wall fall? And at the moment when the Twin Towers fell? If we have experienced all these events, we may have an exact and accurate answer.

We remember those moments with great accuracy. Why? That's what Roger Brown's theory of memory explores .

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A brief introduction: Robert Brown

Roger Brown was a renowned psychologist of American origin famous for his many studies and contributions to various fields of psychology, especially highlighting his studies on human language and its development.

Brown also played an important role in the study of memory, and the research carried out with James Kulik was remarkable regarding the vivid memory of what people were doing at moments of great historical importance. coining the term flashbulb memory .

The vivid memory or the "flashbulb memories"

The flashbulb memories or vivid memories They refer to the precise, intense and persistent memory of the circumstances that surround a situation of great importance in our life. The fact itself is remembered and what we were doing at the precise moment in which it happened or in which we found out about it.

The feeling of the person who has these memories is equivalent to the impression of having something similar to a photograph or a piece of film always available in the memory, completely clear and without possibility of error.

Generally, these are events of great importance at the historical level . Examples of this are found, for example, in people who remember exactly when the man arrived on the Moon, the assassination of Kennedy or Martin Luther King, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the most recent attacks on the Twin Towers.

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Why do we remember it so accurately?

Generally, when we want to remember something it is necessary that the same information is repeated over and over again or that is linked to other knowledge to generate a memory footprint that allows you to remember them later. The nervous connections that are stimulated by the realized learning need to be strengthened. If you never use it or find it useful, our organization will consider that the information is not relevant or useful and you will end up forgetting it.

But many memories are maintained much more permanently without specifying that they are repeated over and over again. This is due to the role of emotions . It is known that when an event awakens an intense emotion generates a memory footprint much more powerful and permanent than events without emotional significance. For example, the first kiss or the birth of a child.

This is the case of the events that generate the flashbulb memories, the main reason why these moments and the circumstances that surround them are remembered in such a vivid way is similar to that of emotional activation: this is an unexpected event that surprises us to a large degree. After the surprise, we process the importance of said event and this, together with the emotional reaction that is generated to confirm this relevance, ends up causing a strong memory to appear of what happened and the circumstances that surrounded it.

But it must be taken into account that the events themselves are recorded only if they are important for the person who remembers them or feel some identification with what happened or those involved. For example, the memory of what was being done at the time of the murder of Martin Luther King is more potent in general for African-American subjects who experienced the effects of racial segregation in the United States than for the Caucasian population.

Related article: "How do emotions affect our memories?" Gordon Bower's theory "

Are these memories totally reliable?

However, even though a large part of the people who claim to remember what happened with great precision and the high emotional impact they had on their lives, the total reliability of such memories is questionable.

Broadly speaking, the most essential information of the event is remembered , but we must bear in mind that our memory tends to focus on capturing the most pertinent information and that every time we remember something, the mind realizes a reconstruction of the facts.

If our mind does not find the relevant information, we unconsciously tend to fill in the gaps by confabulation . In other words, we generally combine and even create material that seems relevant and fits into our reworking.

Thus, it is common for us to unconsciously falsify our memories.It has been proven that the number of correctly remembered details decreases over time, even though the person still believes that all the details remain fresh. And is that little by little we are overwriting the most peripheral information. All this being the subject himself completely convinced that the memory is real and as he tells.