¶ Memory
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Index Entry
Memory:
“By World War II we had come to almost two million chemical compoundsNow the human mind can only retain a certain number of items within a given pattern. At least that is my conclusion. I would say I can remember approximately 5,000 namesof people but these are all special cases and there is nothing logical about it. There are limited sizes of vocabularies, for instance, I can remeber the name of almost every man of the first ship I was on. I don’t see any of these men ever any more and I don’t really need to remember the names as they are of no use to me. But I meet many people every day and I can’t remember their names because the cubby holes are all filled up with those earlier names. They don’t come around to get their mail and I can’t put anyone else in their rooms. So if you were to just try to remember all the chemical compounds, you couldn’t remember them all and you would be in desperate trouble when you are not able to remember more than 5,000. … The kinds of questions I used to hear asked a few years ago on the radio quizzes seemd to me to be the kinds of questions you could not afford to be bothered with. What I saw that you could do was go in the direction of what we call generalization.”
¶ Citations
- OR:GUi. University Lecture #2 - p. 54, 2 Jul’62
