INTRODUCTION TO MEMORY
Have you ever wondered how you manage to remember anything? Are you one of the people who often says, ‘Oh, my memory. It’s terrible!’ Or ‘I’ll have to write that down or I’ll never remember it.’ The bad news is that you are making your memory worse by doing that and the good news is that you can stop telling yourself that now and improve your memory almost immediately. Read on....
It is always NOW
Memory is a strange phenomenon. Without it, it would be as if we were living in a continuous present. It would always be right NOW, and we would have no past. We may not even have much of a future because when we imagine the future we are drawing on memories too and without our memory to help us we would be unable to plan ahead very well. Everything would be new and different all the time. Some of us think that would be pretty cool! However it would also be enormously tiring because we would be constantly having to work out a way to understand what we are experiencing or solve a problem we are encountering and then BANG – it would all have GONE. So that the next time we come across that situation we have nothing to fall back on in our brains. We have to start from scratch again; very time and energy consuming.
We need our memory and it kind of works like a muscle. It doesn’t look like a muscle – but it works like one. The more you use it the more it builds and gets stronger and able to carry lots of weight – in this case, of course, the weight is information. So – if you don’t use it, you lose it. If you do use it you keep it.
How does it work?
Here is a brief Guide to Memory
Memory isn’t a thing – it is a process that parts of our brain use to gain, store and keep information and also recall that information when we need it. This means that there are three big things going on in our brains:
- Changing the information we are getting through our senses (what we see, hear, taste, smell and touch) into the right kind of brain document to record it
- Filing that brain document into the right filing drawer
- Finding it again when we need it
Memory is pretty amazing because once a brain document is filed in a drawer we can stop being conscious of it. Just like that old statement you filed last week – you don’t need to keep telling yourself it is there. Then one day we need to get it again and it comes back into our minds because of something that happened, like a reminder from the Revenue to hand in your tax information. Immediately we are able to remember where we put it, what it looked like and know how to get it again.
We have different types of memory which each do different things
The 3 main ones are
Sensory memory
Short term memory
Long term memory
Quite simple to remember isn’t it!
Sensory memory is what flows through into our short term memory depending on what we are paying attention to. For example, you can be watching a film and really enjoying it. You are taking in all the sounds and sights from the big screen. You are not paying attention to the perfume from the lady sitting behind you, or the feeling of the seat as you sit watching, or even the taste of the popcorn as you dig in for another handful. Si what happens is that your short term memory only gets a bit of the potential river of information from any situation.
Short term memory is like one of those pin pads where your hand leaves an imprint of the palm and fingers for a short time but it fades as the pins return to a middle position and the impression is wiped out. The trick is to make sure that the impression the ‘palm print’ leaves in your short term memory lasts long enough because it is clear and firm enough to get sent back into the long term memory. You can help this along by doing something called ‘chunking’. Think how much easier it is to remember a phone number if it is written 031-445-6641 rather than 0314456641!
find out here short term memory techniques
Long term memory is the point at which your ‘palm print’ is turned into a brain document and the document is stored safely in the filing cabinet under the right folder title. It gets turned into a brain document by being rehearsed and gone over several times. Sometimes you have to repeat it just the same way over and over and sometimes it helps to rehearse it one way one time, another way the next just so your brain gets used to it appearing in slightly different forms. Like having the same words printed on red paper or white paper. Sometimes repeating it and rehearsing it is a good combination. If we don’t do that it is as if the words on the brain document are printed in fading ink and after a while – they are gone and we have forgotten, leaving us with a blank piece of paper and looking very puzzled!
We can help ourselves keep the information in our long term filing cabinet by doing something called ‘Clustering’. Sort of like chunking except that this time you are clustering things together that are similar to help you remember. Have a go at this:
Table, orange, cabinet, blue, apple, chair, green, strawberry, pink, stool, peach, green
Spend a few seconds reading them, then look away and try to recall and list these words. How did you group the words when you listed them? Most people will list using three different categories: colour,furniture and fruit.
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