The famous American mathematician and cyberneticist D. Neumann calculated that the human brain can accommodate about ten to the 20th power of information units, that is, every normal person is able to remember all the information contained in millions of volumes of books.
But this does not happen in life. Is this not a mystery of nature?
What is memory? This is the ability to preserve and reproduce in the mind of the previous impressions and experiences. This definition is given in the dictionary of the Russian language Ozhegov. Memory is an infinitely complex mechanism of brain function, the neural activity of which allows you to filter, store and destroy memories. Allocate voluntary and involuntary memory. According to the duration of fixing and storing information, memory is divided into direct, short-term, sliding and long-term.
Immediate (sensory) memory is an automatic memory, in which one impression is instantly replaced by the next. An example of such a process is typing at a computer: as soon as a letter is typed, a person immediately forgets it to move on to the next.
Short-term, or working (operational) memory works without any conscious intention to memorize. A person simultaneously, not counting, can encompass seven objects (plus or minus two objects) or keep up to seven elements in memory for a maximum of 30 seconds. It works, for example, when we dial a phone number.
Rolling memory is the shortest of all types of memory. This kind of memory is developed, for example, among air traffic controllers: it allows them to focus for a few minutes on the image of a moving point on the radar screen, and after the plane lands, immediately forget about it, switching their attention to the next point.
Long-term memory ensures the preservation of knowledge, abilities and skills for days, months and even years, therefore, its work is determined by more complex mechanisms for recording information, operating on several levels: sensory, emotional and intellectual. It is believed that the amount of long-term memory is practically unlimited.
Depending on the perception of signals by the human body, visual, auditory, tactile (sensations from touch), motor (or motor), gustatory, figurative, emotional, eidetic, olfactory and other types of memory are distinguished.
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For example, it is known that the famous actress of the Moscow Art Theater Olga Knipper-Chekhova before going on stage in the play "The Cherry Orchard" always used the same perfume that evoked certain associations in her. Thus, she used scents as olfactory cues.
Pablo Picasso used a method of training memory under the conventional name "signs of the past." He had a special room where various trinkets, broken wine glasses, old scarves, broken combs and souvenirs were kept. He took an object in his hands, tried to remember what was connected with it - and faces, events, thoughts, conversations, dates floated up in his memory. The artist seemed to be immersed in a pleasant atmosphere of memories.
Good specialists usually have a developed professional memory. Many doctors, especially therapists, remember patients by sight, and most dentists recognize them only after the patient opens his mouth. Tasters have a unique olfactory and gustatory memory, motor memory - athletes, visual memory - policemen and artists, auditory memory - composers and musicians, etc.
For example, 14-year-old Mozart, while serving in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, listened to a large piece for two choirs called Miserere, the score of which was kept secret. He remembered it, and at home he recorded music without making a single mistake. D. D. Shostakovich had a similar memory. Composer A. K. Glazunov easily restored the lost scores of musical works.
There is an interesting case from the biography of the remarkable Russian pianist and composer S. V. Rachmaninov. Once Glazunov had to come to S.'Taneev to play a play he had just written. Taneev, who liked to play a trick, hid Rachmaninov, a student of the conservatory, in another room. Some time after Glazunov finished playing, Taneyev called the young Rachmaninov. The young man sat down at the piano and, to the great surprise of Glazunov, repeated his entire composition.
However, the level of intelligence does not depend on memory. Experiments have shown that both limited and intelligent people can have both good and bad memories. For example, the genius Charlie Chaplin could not even remember the name of his secretary, with whom he worked for seven years.
At the same time, history knows many famous people with phenomenal memory. As is known from history, Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great knew by sight and by name all their soldiers - up to 30 thousand people. The Persian tsar Cyrus and the great Russian commander A. V. Suvorov also possessed the same abilities.
The famous Themistocles and Socrates knew each of the 20 thousand inhabitants of Athens. And Seneca was able to repeat two thousand unrelated words, heard only once. George Noel Gordon Byron knew all his works by heart. The brilliant mathematician Leonard Euler remembered the first six degrees of all numbers up to one hundred.
Academician AF Ioffe used the table of logarithms from memory. Academician S. A. Chaplygin could accurately name the phone number he called only once five years ago. The great Russian chess player A. Alekhin played blindly from memory with 30-40 partners.
The creator of the ingenious engravings, the French artist Gustave Doret could make an accurate drawing from a photograph that he saw once, and then only in passing. Ukrainian historian Mikhail Braichevsky easily found the right page among the ten thousand books that were kept in his home library. He wrote scientific works without a single draft and cited all the quotes from memory.
There are also many phenomena among ordinary people. Someone E. Gasi memorized all two and a half thousand books that he read in his life. And the cashier of the Polish football club "Gurnik" Leopold Held remembered not only all the results, but also all the details of the club's games.
A lawyer from Yerevan, Samvel Gharibyan, already at the age of 20, out of two thousand words named to him, reproduced 1970 from memory. In June 1990, he entered the Guinness Book of Records as a person who unmistakably reproduced one thousand words dictated to him, randomly selected from ten European and Eastern languages (English, German, Urdu, Dari, Farsi, Pashto, Bengali, Esperanto, Arabic and Spanish), thereby challenging the Buddhist monk who remembered 16 thousand lines of poems.
At the end of February 2000, he broke another record, memorizing and repeating from one listening in the same order 1200 Russian words and phrases that were not related in meaning to each other, while losing only 32 words.
Scientists have found that many animals have amazing memories. Some researchers argue that elephants, for example, remember not only the people they met, but also all the offenses that were inflicted on them.
Often, phenomenal memory appears as a compensatory function. In people who have lost any ability to speak, hear or see, that type of memory predominates, which helps to partially compensate for the loss. The sculptor Lina Po, who died in 1948, continued to create sculptures, even going blind. The deafened Beethoven wrote music, and the Russian actor Ostuzhev, having lost his hearing, remained on stage, and he is remembered as an outstanding actor.
But phenomena of a different kind. An English girl from Blackpool in 1931 suddenly began to realize herself as a Babylonian woman, Teleka Ventui, who lived in Ancient Egypt around 1400 BC. e. under Pharaoh Amenhotep III. The child, who was given the pseudonym Rosemary in the file of the British Society for Psychological Research, had the ability to speak in a strange ancient dialect in a trance state.
In this regard, she was examined by the psychiatrist Frederick Wood, who wrote down several phrases and sent them to the Egyptologist Howard Hulm. To the surprise of the psychiatrist, the scientist reported that the girl's phrases contain many archaisms, ancient terms and phrases characteristic of the speech of the Egyptians of the pre-Christian era.
In his presence, the English Rosemary wrote 66 correct phrases in hieroglyphs in an hour and a half. Towards the end of his research, Halm was convinced that he had indeed heard the voice of the distant past.
In 1930, New York physician Dr. Marshall McDuffie discovered that his twin babies were talking in some unknown dialect. He was convinced that it was their own invented language, until a professor of ancient languages who visited their home as a guest stated that they spoke Aramaic, which was in use at the time of Christ.
Not so long ago, people with similar xenoglossic abilities were found. In Toronto, a 30-year-old child psychologist under hypnosis reverted to the days when he was a Viking invading Iceland. The same man also recalled his life in Mesopotamia in 650 AD. e. and could write in the language of those years.
An eleven-year-old American boy under the supervision of Dr. Morris Neterton, a California hypnotist, was able to speak an ancient dialect of the Middle East. So far, no one has managed to explain this phenomenon.
But it was possible to enable a person to master any language within a very short time. Since the end of the 50s of the last century, the CIA and the KGB have been teaching their agents foreign languages according to the 25th frame method, when information gets into the subconscious, bypassing consciousness, which increases the ability to memorize hundreds of times. This made it possible to learn in a few hours what would normally take years.
A group of researchers led by professor at the University of Tokyo Yasuji Miyashita was able to prove that the entire memory mechanism is concentrated in the temporal lobes of the gray matter of the brain. First, the information seen is transmitted along the optic nerve to the outer shell of the cerebral cortex, and then to its inner region, which is actually an "archive" of memory.
This takes one tenth of a second. During such a time, electrochemical reactions occur in the inner region of the cortex, which, as it were, encode the received information, translate it into symbols, by which neurons can find and return the necessary "pictures". They do this when a person remembers: they send the required information to the surface of gray matter, but at a much slower speed - no more than four tenths of a second.
Japanese researchers have confirmed what everyone intuitively feels: a person does not forget anything. Everything that has ever been seen and experienced is stored in the annals of memory and can be called, so to speak, to the surface. This is what happens, in particular, to the drowned people who were brought back to life.
Many of them say that before their consciousness faded, in a matter of seconds their entire life passed in front of their inner gaze to the smallest detail. Scientists explain this by the fact that, in search of salvation, the brain "scrolls" its entire life, looking for similar situations in it that would suggest how to get rid of mortal danger.
Based on the research, scientists concluded: a person does not forget anything at all, but simply not everything can remember. The reasons for this may lie in certain violations of the connections between the external and internal sides of the cerebral cortex.
Memory impairment is noticeable in alcoholics of any age. Just a few sips of alcohol are enough to impair short-term memory. It is also weakened in smokers. And in those who smoke more than one pack of cigarettes or cigarettes a day, both visual and verbal types of memory are affected. All drowsiness-causing chemicals and medications, as well as coffee, are also harmful. An excess of caffeine in the blood causes nervousness, excitability, palpitations, incompatible with attention and memory.
Unexpected findings were made by Swedish scientists who found an amazing relationship between memory functions and the presence of teeth in humans.
As it turned out, people who, for one reason or another, have lost several teeth, have less ability to mentally fix what they did at one time or another, or determine where and at what moment they were.
At the same time, our brain resists the excess of information and turns on defense mechanisms to displace unnecessary information. Scientists believe that they are removed under the influence of various situations, emotions, etc. This phenomenon was studied by Freud, who believed that there are no accidentally forgotten events.
If, for example, a person does not remember a report that is to be read soon, then this is not accidental: either he does not want to speak in front of this audience, or the topic is not to his liking, but he cannot or does not want to admit it even to himself.
Scientists are still struggling with the riddles of the functioning of human memory; there are many theories that in one way or another explain a person's ability to remember.
In the age of computer technology, the human brain is still the most perfect mechanism for processing and analyzing information - after all, even the most modern computer does not receive information directly from the surrounding world. He only operates (albeit millions of times faster than a person) information reduced to a binary code, and much depleted due to technological limitations.
So what is human memory? One of the answers was given by the German writer Jean Paul: "Memory is the only paradise from which there is no expulsion."