Within the category of explicit memories, episodic memories represent times, places, associated emotions and other contextual information that make up autobiographical events.
based on our readings both episodic and explicit memory go hand in hand but are handled by different functions in our brain. This means that people can potentially be lacking in episodic memory or explicit memory and have one greater than the other.
Fear, for example, mobilizes the body to fight or flee; happiness rewards achieving goals and builds attachments to other people.
When your body reacts first over your mind it is the perfect example of a gut feeling that you should never avoid because it will always instinctively give you a fight or flight response
that distraction during learning impairs later memory (e.g., Craik, Govoni, Naveh-Benjamin, & Anderson, 1996). Most of the time this is not problematic, but in certain situations, such as when you are studying for an exam, failures to encode due to distraction can have serious repercussions.
People saying that learning overall is important but i believe it is also HOW you learn it that makes it important as well. If you are distracted, it can ruin the progress you developed while trying to see or listen and need to make sure your full attention is on the variable.
Nothing gets people’s attention like something startling. Surprise, a simple emotion, hijacks a person’s mind and body and focuses them on a source of possible danger (Simons, 1996). When there’s a loud, unexpected crash, people stop, freeze, and orient to the source of the noise. Their minds are wiped clean—after something startling, people usually can’t remember what they had been talking about—and attention is focused on what just happened. By focusing all the body’s resources on the unexpected event, surprise helps people respond quickly
It's interesting to see the the emotion of surprise no matter how composed, calm or worried you are, the feeling of surprise always affects everyone the same because you lose all that feeling of readiness when it hits you. On the other hand, surprises can sometimes show one's best moments as your whole body is reacting and focusing to the surprise, your reaction, thinking can also temporally be enhanced for that moment. I said in the last lecture that because we are different there are different results but i think this time for the emotion of surprise the background event and how unique it is what determines what emotion of surprise the person may feel.
You might think that the most important thing is to try to learn. Interestingly, this is not true, at least not completely. Trying to learn a list of words, as compared to just evaluating each word for its part of speech (i.e., noun, verb, adjective) does help you recall the words—that is, it helps you remember and write down more of the words later. But it actually impairs your ability to recognize the words—to judge on a later list which words are the ones that you studied (Eagle & Leiter, 1964). So this is a case in which incidental learning—that is, learning without the intention to learn—is better than intentional learning.
I agree and had a feeling about this for a long time ago because we are all DIFFERENT, meaning we all have our ways of learning. Yes, the most common way is to keep reading until it is fully in your brain but for many people, they use different practices in order to learn what they want to install in their mind. Examples would include writing it down themselves several times, quizzing themselves, flash cards, use examples to reference the topic they are learning, write their own notes or even other unique strategies for them to understand the content.