Tax season can be stressful. I think about how easy it becomes to overlook certain stuff. One can be distracted by either happy events or sad events. I remember how I accidentally signed the wrong document when my paternal grandmother died of old age. I remember how I could easily forget receipts until I started to document them. Memory should be the least reliable tool ever. I tend to get mad whenever I become forgetful. We end up excessively scolding others for their bad memory. I even end up either (1) scolding others too hard, or (2) being too hard on myself. That's why I've grown critical of the education system itself. Just imagine that even honor roll students are forgetting what they learned back in high school. Right now, I even have to download notes to relearn stuff that I learned in college.
This may be the best picture for college, especially for those without a board exam. I didn't take the board exam since I'm a business administration graduate. I confess that I refer to old books and scholarly websites--to relearn the basic accounting. It's because I'm not practicing cost accounting. We're told in our classes that we learn accounting--to understand what the accountant is doing. It's also good to learn accounting, to be able to understand the stupidity of people. For example, learning accounting is how I'm able to easily refute #SahodItaasPresyoIbaba economics. Speaking of bad memory, I wouldn't be surprised if people who took either Information Technology or Computer Science suddenly forgot even basic programming, if they're not practicing it!
To understand how unreliable memory is, Psychology Today says this:
We tend to think that memories are stored in our brains just as they are in computers. Once registered, the data are put away for safekeeping and eventual recall. The facts don’t change.
But neuroscientists have shown that each time we remember something, we are reconstructing the event, reassembling it from traces throughout the brain. Psychologists have pointed out that we also suppress memories that are painful or damaging to self-esteem. We could say that, as a result, memory is unreliable. We could also say it is adaptive, reshaping itself to accommodate the new situations we find ourselves facing. Either way, we have to face the fact that it is “flexible.”
For most of us, that usually means we recall a rosier past than we actually had, though some of us are tormented by memories of a painful past we can’t shake and that seems to get worse every time we revisit them. But for all of us, that means an incomplete past.
In short, memory is really a bad tool. To understand more, I would share more from the excerpt I got from above:
These facts are sobering for those of us who tend to rely on our unreliable memories, whether we are investors trying to recall what experts have told us or just going about daily business, trying to learn from our own experience.
It makes sense to keep objective records of our decisions and our acts. (If we use our computers for that, we can usually count on their invariant memories.) But we usually feel it is too much trouble to record so much information, and we avoid the task.
It's time to keep swallowing our pride and start accepting that we can be weak. In fact, I find it hard to remember or complete a task without a checklist. Forgetfulness is really a problem that we all struggle with. Even worse, it's easy to scold a person for forgetfulness while ignoring what causes them to increase. In fact, the number one culprit can be a lack of sleep. That's why students should avoid getting too much homework and should have no homework over the weekend. Students should be allowed to rest during the weekends. In some cases, students may be productive over the weekend, focusing on long-term projects--such as the science project. Students shouldn't be working on anything else during the weekend, except for any long-term projects assigned last month. If they have to work on their term paper during the weekend, they should only focus on that. Otherwise, there may be other ways to avoid homework over the weekend.