Module 11 Blog 2

My Story: Once there was a clown. He woke up on a typical morning out of his bed, grabbed the clothes and top hat off his chair, and went in the bathroom to comb his hair and trim his red nose with a pair of scissors. Next, he went down stairs to eat a healthy breakfast of donuts and cake, and finished it off with a glass of milk. He fed his fish, turned off the news, and walked outside. As he turned around from locking his door, he saw a deer in his front yard. As he was trying to get closer, he tripped over a package on his front steps, and the deer ran off, but he almost fell on top of a mouse. He yelled, and felt embarrassed like the elephants at work. Once he got to work, he went to his friend the bear trainer to tell him about his eventful morning.

This activity was a lot of fun, and it made remembering the objects a lot easier. Some of the objects weren’t in my story, but I still remembered them. I think this is because I was able to chunk out information. I remembered the food and milk because in my story, that’s what the clown had for breakfast. Likewise, I remembered (feeding the) fish, the comb, the scissors, the top hat and the television, because they are all used in the morning. Even though I didn’t include all the animals in my story, I still remembered that there were six or seven animals, and got almost all of them. For groups like this, chunking works because we already can connect animals to each other. The story-telling method works for completely unrelated things because it connects objects that have had no previous categories in our minds.

This activity influences memory on all three levels, working, sensory, and long term. First, we see the pictures, which involve sensory memory, but once we focus our attention on these pictures and start chunking and rehearsing them, using the story-telling method, they move to the working memory. I also think this information will stick in my long term memory as well, because I find it interesting, and will probably remember this example (and some specific objects from it) if I tell someone else about it, or think about it in the next couple days or weeks, or if I am reviewing this module for the final in a couple months.