One of the most significant marketing books I always suggest reading is Positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout, 1982; the subtitle – The battle for your mind – is the true bearer of the content of the book. Most of the marketing strategies and market research that we know and use today were built on these concepts. I think that memory is a kind of sixth sense that bases its construction on the main five senses and it settles on the basis of experiences – positive and negative, direct and indirect – that we make during our lives. Memory becomes an essential generator of our consciousness, of our awareness and of our knowledge and, one could say, that what we remember corresponds to what we know and, therefore, to who we are. “Those who suffer from Alzheimer's not only lose their memory, but also their personality”.
Studies on memory and the brain are very active and represent one of the most unexplored frontiers of the human being for understanding cognitive and behavioral processes.
Today we talk more and more about semantic memory, i.e. that part of memory that concerns general knowledge and the result of scholastic, episodic and experiential learning. Major part of these studies focus on memory encoding, retention, and retrieval. Future applications of semantic memory range from machine learning (learning programs for computers and robots) to artificial intelligence. The passage is still long, but the direction is taken. In the near future, automation will learn from human behaviors by connecting semantic memories through direct experiences and repeated behaviors. Artificial intelligence will break through the boundary of prediction and develop anticipatory capabilities that will precede the reasoning, sequences and behaviors related to a given process, with or without the support of human beings. Thus cars will be able to travel without the driver and surgical operations can be performed without a surgeon.
Apart from these applications, the nodal points of human semantic memory are the acquisition and retention of knowledge and experience. Learning more and better is the inexhaustible source to feed our semantic memory which is magically transformed in distinctive identity.
“I always do what I don't know how to do, to learn how to do it.” Vincent Van Gogh. All the Best!
