Hyperthymesia Foer Analysis

In “The End of Remembering” by Joshua Foer, the author gushes about Gordon Bell, a Microsoft employee who wears a camera around his neck, records his phone calls, and scans every paper he sees into a database. Bell catalogs his life as a means to remember everything that happens to him. If he needs to remember what happened on June 3, 2004, he can search his “lifelog” (Foer 172) and discover the events of that particular date in time. In essence, Bell is creating an external autobiographical memory. Internal autobiographical memory, on the other hand, is extremely rare; with only 25 confirmed cases as of 2016 (Pitchaiah et al. 701). Scientifically, autobiographical memory is known as hyperthymesia, and patients naturally recall vivid memories …show more content…
Price discusses her difficulty in school within her memoir. “I had lots of trouble memorizing history, arithmetic, foreign language, and science facts because I had to be genuinely interested in information of that kind in order to remember it” (Price 24). In his essay, “The Banking Concept of Education,” Paulo Freire compares the educational system to a bank. According to the banking concept, the teacher is armed with knowledge while the students know nothing. The teacher “deposits” information into the students, and they are thought to have learned. “The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher” (Freire 222). In the banking concept, no actual learning takes place because no critical thinking is required. Freire would argue that Price is a victim of the banking concept of education. She struggled in school because struggled with memorization, and, according to Freire, memorization does not equate learning. “Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information” (Freire 221). Rote memorization, which is the same as learning under the banking concept, is not improved by