Human Memory |
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Designing a TUI requires an understanding of human memory. Most overviews of human memory represent brain structures using a kind of flowchart or state machine metaphor—like the illustration below. This can be a handy representation, and I share it here as a starting point for our journey through the world of human memory. Go to your favorite search engine and type in any one of the words you see in the illustration, and you will be literally inundated with similar figures. 
I have to alert you that I don’t care for these kinds of simplifications. They encourage the reader to form an image of the human brain as essentially a computer—with “buffers” and “temporary storage,” and a separation between data and actions. You tend to want to imagine that one “layer of processing” passes data upward to a next layer, eventually computing a model of reality based on sensory interpretation. Such models tend to mislead. |
In its favor, however, the illustration presents a way of thinking about memory that can be convenient. And it does so by providing a visual metaphor that allows us to appreciate the structural and functional differences that have turned up in the huge volume of psychological data over the years. So I present it with the caveat that we’re talking about human brains here, not a Von Neumann computer. Memory is divided into three functional units—sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory. In the illustration, we are dealing only with the auditory modality as it applies to spoken language. I draw the illustration as a state machine for clarity. |
