The challenge to this way of conducting research regarding memory was hoisted most memorably in 1978, when Ulric Neisser (1982, pp.11-12), an icon in the field of cognitive psychology, offered the following conclusion at a major conference:

. . . [T]he results of a hundred years of the psychological study of memory are somewhat discouraging. We have established from empirical generalizations, but most of them are so obvious that every ten-year-old knows them anyway. We have made discoveries, but they are only marginally about memory; in many cases we don’t know what to do with them, and wear them out with endless experimental variations. We have an intellectually impressive group of theories, but history offers little confidence that they will provide any meaningful insight into natural behavior.

Neisser goes on in Memory Observed (Neisser, 1982) to offer a set of studies which study memory in a quite different manner. Neisser even has the temerity to cite the value of work done by Sigmund Freud (the nemesis of modern psychology) regarding “natural” memory. In his own conclusion regarding the nature and function of memory, Neisser (1982, p. 16) offers the following:

In most instances of daily remembering, it is meanings and not surface details that we must recall. Just as the oral historian remembers what happened instead of memorizing some formula of words that describes it, so too we recall the substance of what we heard or read rather than its verbatim form. This is now generally acknowledged, even in laboratory research. The new wave of enthusiasm for Bartlett’s ideas and for the use of stories as memory materials has led us to devalue the study of rote remorization almost completely.

Neisser has introduced important function being served by the chunking together of information to be stored. He has also brought forth the long-ignored work of Frederick Bartlett regarding the dynamics of memory.

Consolidation and Construction

We now are fully appreciative of the fact that chunking brings about (or is at least associated with) making meaning of something. In remembering a poem, we benefit not only from its structure and potential rhyming as an aide for the retention of the poem, but also benefit from the meaning of the poem. This is also the case when the pianist is “memorizing” a concerto. This piece of music has not only a structure (for example, a sonata form), but also a theme or progression of several themes. A concerto made up of a series of unrelated and dissonant (“nonsense”) notes might be innovative—but it would also be much harder for the pianist to remember. Even Luria’s mnemonist is creating something that is meaningful: the walking tour down a street in order to look in the store windows.

Schemata

This walking down the street by Luria’s patient invites us to explore an level of cognitive processing in the brain. Like the walk down the street, it brings together many different elements and integrates them around some general theme or narrative. These Meta-assemblies are called Schemata. Originally presented as a way to think about the nature of remembering by Frederic Bartlett (1995) and offered in parallel fashion by Vygotsky (2012) and Piaget (Piaget and Cook, 1952) , (with a focus on cognitive development in children), schemas (another way to spell schemata) have come to play a prevalent role in the study of memory.

Schemata have typically been defined as an epistemological (knowledge-based) process of gathering together and clustering specific memories. We engage schemas to help us make sense of the world in which we live and work—much as Piaget wrote about the process of assimilation which brings in new information and incorporates in existing cognitive structures (schemas). Without this assimilative process, the world we encounter would be the great blooming, buzzing confusion that William James described as our initial at-birth (pre-schema) experience of the world