A Note on the Illustration
"Elephants never forget..." A well-known saying. Though probably untrue, there
is always the possibility that it is accurate. Elephants seldom are confronted
with exams or teaching methods which would lead to inert knowledge. In fact,
they are probably a good example of a species mostly involved in practical
knowledge, a la Schank. As for
their working memory, it is probably not essential for them to keep more than 7 +
or -2 things on their mind at once. A possible theory for their occasional mad
stampede is cognitive overload, when they are required to remember the locations
of several different tasty shrubs while keeping their eye on a lion or poacher,
or both.
The picture also represents an example of the emergence of Autobiographical
knowledge in Early Childhood (Nelson). It may be that early childhood memories
are not accessible due to the fact that they are not stored in the same way, due
to different schemata or frames of reference (Pillemer).
One of my earliest memories of
computer disks were the (large, floppy plastic) ones at my kindergarten best
friend's house-- his father built computers for a small local company
(now amazingly successful). To remind everyone that the function of disks was to
store things (this was 1980, perhaps the concept of Memex was still a goal),
there was a picture of an elephant, more detailed but not too dissimilar from the
one in question, with a slogan that said "Elephants Never Forget." I didn't know
the purpose of disks at the time so I wondered why such a boring-looking thing
had such a nice picture on it. I wondered enough to keep it active enough that
when I wrote this paper and it occured to me why they had chosen that slogan,
although the disk company probably doesn't use it anymore. This all led me to
the theory of my paper, which is: like Schank, I think you probably have to
ask yourself questions to remember them and get the answer properly.
Hey, everyone else had a picture. I thought I needed one too. I drew it myself.
Back to the real paper