My Memory Essay Example
A memory that I have is when my friends and I went to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter back in the summer of 2013. I recall getting on a rollercoaster right after I had had a very large mug of ButterBeer, and I wasn’t the only one. It was completely worth it, that is before I got on the ride, it was delicious, but after getting off the ride (which was awesome too), I felt really sick, like I was going to throw up. The ride was very epic: It was a ride that went up and down and there was a dragon that blew fake fire in my face. After the ride, I felt terrible and the nauseous effects lasted for a long time. I threw up and completely lost my appetite. Just the thought of Butterbeer brought back the awful nauseous effects in my stomach. I recall that some of my friends had told me before to not get on the ride right after drinking the ButterBeer. I didn’t listen to them of course, and the result was disastrous.
My friends (Zach, Katie, Michael, and Molly), and my memories of this event differ greatly. Regarding encoding, I was able to remember the event because of how sick (sensory input), I got while my friends were able to most vividly remember the reaction and the words that I said (visual and semantic encoding). I couldn’t remember what I said. Their short term memory of storage was different from mine because they remembered exactly what I said even when so much was happening in our surroundings.
This was an example of visual encoding while mine was sensory, however the sounds of our surroundings that were interfering then, managed to get into their memory as they were distracted, as they were the ones that were having fun; this was an example of both elaborative and acoustic encoding. I failed to remember what was going on around me as I was suffering from nausea, therefore I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings at all. Regarding long-term memory, my friends and I went to eat out at a restaurant and for dessert we all had chocolate and burnt butterscotch layer cake. As we ate the cake the memory of the butterbeer came back to us and they said ”Remember the time when Jerry drank that butterbeer at Harry Potter World, that was hilarious”. My version for long-term memory was only remembering the intense emotions of being sick but also with the intense feelings of happiness that day.
My friends also remembered working memory different from me. They were trying to remember which rides that they had already gone on and which ones they hadn’t yet done. They were trying to remember the number and the exact order in which they had ridden them (as they were walking and looking for something to eat, while I was trying to figure out what was going on in that very restricted moment. I was trying to remember what had happened before I had gotten on the ride, I was trying to remember the whole process of getting sick because I didn’t understand what was happening to me.
Retrieval for my friends was easy as they were laughing at my facial expressions and my moaning and that was associated with the laughter of simply having a fun time. My retrieval however was more painful, but also good because it was both a good and bad day. When I am in a certain environment such as a zoo, the memory cues come to me as the environment is similar. My friends retrieval through cues was simply walking downtown. This is known as the encoding specificity principle. Finally my friends version of attention was that they saw that I was sick and managed to successively block out other stimuli. Their surroundings became part of short-term memory at the time. My version was that I had my attention on figuring out what was wrong with me, therefore I was able to concentrate on that because the feelings were so intense. Finally they forgot the ride that I went on but I still remembered it because it was the one that I got sick on. My friends forgot it easily because they didn't get sick.
