Surely each of us wants to have such a memory to memorize textbooks, courses, languages and other important information for us quickly and as long as possible. But many people think that such a “special” genius should be from birth. But no! As scientists from the University of Radboud proved by publishing the results of their work in the journal Neuron (IF = 13.974).
Scientists have found that after 40 days of daily 30-minute training using the strategic method of improving memory, people whose abilities were not highlighted and had not previously trained more than doubled the amount of information memorized, naming 62 instead of the initial 26 words in a list of 72. Interesting that after four months without continuing training, the memorization rates remained high.
Brain scans before and after training showed that a strategic approach to writing information into the brain changed its functional connections, making them more similar to those of the world memory champions.
The top 10 most "memorable" athletes in the world a few years ago included co-author Boris Konrad, a professional memory trainer who is a postdoc in the lab of the study's lead author, Martin Dresler. Konrad, who took up this unusual kind of intellectual sport in order to improve his academic performance, and his main competitors for the world title, memorized about five hundred numbers or a hundred words in just five minutes. He helped connect Dresler with other top athletes.
Trained phenomenal memory
The team examined the brains of 23 world-class sports masters and 23 people of similar age, health and intelligence, but with typical memory skills. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the difference in bond strength between different regions of the brain. In addition, a structural MRI was connected, which made it possible to measure the difference in their sizes.
Initially, Dresler expected champions to be markedly different in brain anatomy, like the world weightlifting champions who have extraordinarily pumped muscles. However, no differences were found on the MRI. Most likely, it was all about the "connection" model, which was followed by about 2500 different interneuronal contacts in the brain. And one subset of 25 compounds singled out athletes the most from the “crowd”.
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Konrad, who also underwent the scan, was not born with exceptional memory skills. Actually, like other athletes that Dresler studied.
"They have been preparing their brains for months and years using mnemonic strategies to achieve unusually high levels of performance," the scientist notes.
Strategy is strength
In order to find out how the technique will work on the brain, Dresler and his colleagues recruited 51 people, matched by health parameters close to athletes, but with a normal memory and no training whatsoever. They were divided into three groups: two training and one control. Before and after exercise, the brain was scanned.
Two groups underwent two teaching methods: short-term memory training and strategic memorization training. During the first, individual tactics were used to help write sequences into memory, which looked like a game for concentration. The second taught a systematic way of memorizing lists.
For strategic memorization, Dresler chose the so-called locus memory training that most athletes use. According to her, the elements of the list are associated with some place, and people are guided by it in order to correctly reproduce the sequence (this teaching method is available here).
Those who learned with the locus method showed significant improvements in their ability to recall word lists. Before training, people played about 26-30 words on average. A little later, they were able to recall over 35 words. Those who trained short-term memory could not name more than 11 words, and without training they spoke about 7 at all. Four months later, the memory performance of the “strategists” increased by an average of 22 words compared to what it was before training.
After a course of study, brain scans showed that those who memorized with "loci", functional connections and patterns of connections became similar to those of athletes.
What's the secret?
To understand what is the essence of the functional restructuring of connections, scientists have carefully studied 25 types of "connections" that are most different between professionals and ordinary people. They were found in two regions of the brain. The medial prefrontal cortex is known to be active when people correlate new knowledge with previous ones. And the right dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex is involved in strategic learning.
Dresler and his team will continue to analyze brain scans to learn more about the differences in patterns of connections and how they affect memory.
Anna Horuzhaya