Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
After twenty there is marked change in the memory content. The male
acquires more and the female less visual and auditory memories. The
memories of the female are more logical, and topographical features
increase. Memories of sickness and accidents to self decrease with the
males and increase with the females, while in the case of both there
is relative decline in the memories of sickness and accident to
others. From all this it would appear that different memories
culminate at different periods, and bear immediate relation to the
whole mental life of the period. While perhaps some of the finer
analyses of Colegrove may invite further confirmation, his main
results given above are not only suggestive, but rendered very
plausible by his evidence.
Statistics based upon replies to the question as to whether pleasant
or unpleasant experiences were best remembered, show that the former
increase at eleven, rise rapidly at fourteen, and culminate at
eighteen for males, and that the curve of painful memories follows the
same course, although for both there is a drop at fifteen. For
females, the pleasant memories increase rapidly from eleven to
thirteen, decline a little at fourteen, rise again at sixteen, and
culminate at seventeen, and the painful memories follow nearly the
same course, only with a slight drop at fifteen. Thus, up to
twenty-two for males, there is a marked preponderance of pleasant over
painful memories, although the two rise and fall together. After
thirty, unpleasant memories are but little recalled. For the Indians
and negroes in this census, unpleasant memories play a far more and
often preponderating rôle suggesting persecution and sad experiences.
Different elements of the total content of memory come to prominence
at different ages. He also found that the best remembered years of
life are sixteen to seventeen for males and fifteen for females, and
that in general the adolescent period has more to do than any other in
forming and furnishing the memory plexus, while the seventh and eighth
year are most poorly remembered.
It is also known that many false memories insert themselves into the
texture of remembered experiences. One dreams a friend is dead and
thinks she is till she is met one day in the street; or dreams of a
fire and inquires about it in the morning; dreams of a present and
searches the house for it next day; delays breakfast for a friend, who
arrived the night before in a dream, to come down to breakfast; a
child hunts for a bushel of pennies dreamed of, etc. These phantoms
falsify our memory most often, according to Dr. Colegrove, between
sixteen and nineteen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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