The Importance of Memory The Importance of Memory To understand how we learn, it is first necessary to understand something about how we think. Intelligence is fundamentally a memory-based process. Learning means the dynamic modification of memory. A system can be said to have learned if it is different at time t1 from the way it was at time t0. Under this kind of definition, even forgetting is a kind of learning.
Human memories are in a constant state of dynamic modification.
Learning depends upon inputs. Each word you read and each sight you see changes your memory in some way. The role of memory is the interpretation and the placement of those inputs. Memory must decide what's worth keeping by determining what the meaning of an input is and where it fits in relation to previous knowledge it has already stored. One commonsense but incorrect view of memory is that it is simply a warehouse where we keep our knowledge when we are not using it.