Hello, the greatest writer of memory in my opinion, Marcel Proust said, quote,

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical

laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

Can memory really contain the sum of all our experience?

Is it a repository of constantly mounting events waiting to be plucked to consciousness?

Or if not, then under what criteria are memories erased.

With me to discuss the science of memory, I'm Martin Conway, Professor of Psychology at Durham University, Kim Graham, Senior Scientist

at the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, and Mark Copplement,

Professor of Neuropsychiatry at King's College London and St Thomas's Hospital.

Martin Conway, when we perceive or experience something which is going to become a memory,

what are we doing?

What's the initial process?

I think if I could answer that completely would have solved most of the problems of the human mind, but we do have some evidence and there are some things that can be said.

First of all, we don't really have any conscious control over what we

encode. We can try to remember things but by and large it's out of our conscious

attentional control. So there are a set of unconscious processes that operate to encode

experience and those processes are sensitive to the relevance of the experience, how it maps

onto our goals, how it fits with our self-concerns, our self-image,

and also how much effort we actually expend in To break that down he to real simplicities at this stage are you saying that you can't force yourself to remember

things because a lot of people would say well what was I doing at school all that time?

Mm indeed I think we need to step back and confront another complexity before we can really get to that question.

We need to think about what it is that's actually getting into memory. If we're learning facts, then that's rather

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