feel of the sun on my skin to the instant I unexpectedly and unhappily got
soaked—goes through this conversion and routing process.
Encoding involves all of our senses, and
their processing centers are
scattered throughout the brain. Hence, the blender concept. In one 10-
second encounter with an overly friendly dog, the brain recruits hundreds of
different brain regions and coordinates the electrical activity of millions of
neurons, encoding a single episode over vast neural differences.
Hard to believe, isn’t it? The world appears to you as a unified whole.
So how does your brain keep track of everything, and then how does it
reunite all the elements to produce this perception of continuity? It is a
question that has bothered researchers for years. It is called the “binding
problem,” from the idea that certain thoughts
are bound together in the
brain to provide continuity. We have very little insight into how the brain
routinely and effortlessly gives us this illusion of stability.
Effortless vs. effortful processing
There’s another way the brain decides how to encode information.
Encoding when viewed from a psychological perspective is the manner in
which we apprehend, pay attention to, and organize information so that we
can store it. It is one of the many intellectual processes Kim Peek was so
darn good at. The brain chooses among several types of encoding, and the
ease with which we remember something depends in part on process used
for encoding.
Automatic processing
Some years ago, I attended an amazing Paul McCartney concert. If you
were to ask me what I had for dinner before the concert and what happened
onstage, I could tell you about both events in great detail. Though the actual
memory is very complex (composed of spatial locations,
sequences of
events, sights, smells, tastes, etc.), I did not have to write down some
exhaustive list of its varied experiences, then try to remember the list in
detail just in case you asked me about my evening.
This is because my brain deployed a type
of encoding scientists call
automatic processing. Automatic processing occurs with glorious
unintentionality, requiring minimal attention or effort. The brain appears to
use this type of encoding in cases where we can visualize the information
we encounter. (Automatic processing is often associated with being able to
recall the physical location of the information, what came before it, and
what came after it.) It is very easy to recall data that have been encoded via
this process. The memories seem bound all together into a cohesive, readily
retrievable form.
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