Memory is one of the mental functions and types of mental activity, designed to store, accumulate and reproduce information. Thanks to memory, we use our own experience and the experience of previous generations in everyday life. Can you improve it somehow? What does it depend on? Let's try to answer these questions.
Short-term and long-term memory
There are two types of memory - short-term, or operational, and long-term. During the session, students manage to “cram” into their memory a huge amount of information that disappears immediately after the exam. Patients with so-called senile forgetfulness remember in great detail the events that took place in early childhood or many years ago, but they are unable to keep in mind what was half an hour ago.
Bill Gates remembers hundreds of codes for the programming language he created
The possibilities of memory are endless. It is believed that an adult can remember from twenty to one hundred thousand words. There are people who have phenomenal memories. Alexander the Great remembered the names of all his soldiers. Academician Abram Ioffe knew the entire table of logarithms by heart. It was enough for Mozart to hear a piece of music once in order to perform it and write it down on paper. After listening to Allegri's Miserere (in 9 parts), he managed to write down the entire score of this work from memory, which was kept secret by the Vatican. On the second listening, Mozart found only a few wrong notes in his recording. Sergei Rachmaninov had the same musical memory. Conductor Arturo Toscanini remembered every note of the 400 scores. Winston Churchill knew almost all of Shakespeare by heart. Dominic O'Brien from Great Britain managed to memorize the position of the shuffled cards of one deck in 38 seconds. Bill Gates remembers hundreds of codes for the programming language he created.
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A person begins to remember already in the womb
According to scientists, the memory of a human fetus begins to work 20 weeks after conception. During the tests, a sound signal was sent through the mother's abdomen, which the fetus could hear; then the response was checked using an ultrasound scanner. It turned out that the fetus reacts to noise by slightly moving its body or legs. However, after the fifth signal, he "got used" to the repetitive sound and could ignore it. When the signal was sent again after 10 minutes and even after a day, the embryo could easily recognize the familiar sound. Scientists believe that a person, in principle, can remember what happened to him in the womb.
Memory is individual
Many factors affect memory. Someone better remembers what they saw, someone - what they heard. In such cases, they speak of visual or auditory memory. The subject of interest is better remembered. The stability of the memory of feelings is well known. In a state of emotional upsurge, things that seem to have long been forgotten are sometimes recalled from memory. Motivation is very important. A person who considers himself absolutely incapable of languages, having found himself in a foreign country in a stressful situation, when the question is about physical survival, easily learns the language. In many ways, the ability to memorize depends on training. British scientists, using a special scanner, examined the frontal lobe of the brain, which controls movement in space, in taxi drivers and representatives of other professions. It turned out that it is much more developed among taxi drivers. Little of,the better the driver is familiar with the city, the shorter way he can travel from one place to another, the larger the frontal lobe of his brain. In this case, the volume of gray matter as a whole does not change, it is simply distributed in a different way.
Absent-mindedness is not a sign of poor memory
Absent-mindedness is often confused with poor memory. But scattered people are actually just immersed in their thoughts, their attention is just concentrated, but on something else, and they are not interested in everyday information. Often, for memory impairment, inattention caused by overwork, the consequences of the disease, that is, the state in which the person is at the moment, is taken. Smells prevent memory loss. This is due to the proximity of the olfactory center with the "memory" area of the brain. Acute memory reaction to smells, apparently, is programmed: the role of smells in the survival of ancient man was very great.
Memory does not always deteriorate with age
Complaints about poor memory become more frequent after 40 years, and even more so in old age. In fact this is not true. It's just that at the end of active study there is no need to memorize something, the skill to strain memory disappears, and it “detrains”. Actors who have to learn new roles all their lives, and in old age, cope with long texts. Now in some countries, for example, in Germany and the USA, more and more often people, after retirement, go to universities (usually to humanitarian faculties), study quite successfully and pass exams on a par with their young classmates.
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Ability to forget
It is impossible to remember everything. Learning to forget is essential to human survival. The brain must free itself from the unnecessary burden of impressions and information. The memory itself regulates the load, prepares to receive new information. In this case, the old information does not disappear without a trace, but passes from active memory to passive, from where it can sometimes be extracted. This wonderful property saves many people in tragic situations.
Memory can be improved
In most cases, memory can be improved. Previously, it was believed that in an adult, brain cells - neurons - do not divide and gradually die off. But it turned out that this is not the case. Recent studies show that neurons are dividing even at the age of 70. Moreover, multiplying cells are found in the most "thinking" parts of the brain. Now scientists believe that age-related weakening of memory is associated not so much with the physical death of neurons, but with the violation of contacts between them. Substances that help establish such contacts are known. These are, first of all, vitamins C, E, B6, B12, beta-carotene, fatty acids contained in salmon, tuna, sardines, herring, extract from the ginkgo biloba plant.
Impression, repetition and association
The average person uses no more than ten percent of their innate memory capacity. The other ninety percent is lost because we don't know how to use the natural laws of memorization. And these laws are very simple. There are three of them - impression, repetition and association.
So, you want to remember something. First, for this you need to concentrate and get an impression, using not only sight, but also hearing and smell.
The visual impression is the most durable. After all, the nerves leading from the eye to the brain are twenty times thicker than the nerves leading from the ear to the brain. Mark Twain could not remember the sequence of his speech when he used the notes, but when he dropped the notes and began to use drawings for memorization, all his difficulties disappeared.
The second law of memory is repetition. Thousands of Muslim students know the Koran by heart - a book about the same size as the New Testament. They manage to remember it mainly through repetition.
And finally, the third law is associations. The only way to reliably remember a fact is to associate it with some other.
Memory training
1. 5-10 minutes after waking up, count down from 100 to 1 as quickly as possible.
2. Review the alphabet, coming up with a word for each letter. If you've forgotten a letter or can't think of a word, don't stop. The pace is important here.
3. Name twenty male names and the same number of female names.
4. Select any letter of the alphabet and name twenty words starting with it.
5. Close your eyes and count to twenty.
6. You can learn poetry. The main thing is to do it gradually and regularly, constantly increasing the volume of the memorized text. In addition, you should like the poems - if the memorization process goes through strength, then a good result is unlikely to be achieved.
7. Remember the past day. In the evening, lying in bed before going to bed, it is necessary to mentally scroll through all the events of the past day, like a film strip, and in the reverse order - from evening to morning. In this case, you need to try to remember as many details as possible. The main rule of this exercise is that you cannot focus on the negative. Remembering events should be detached, as if observing them from the side.
8. Make associations. For example, in childhood we all memorized a rainbow using the phrase “Every hunter wants to know where the pheasant is sitting”, where the first letters of each word are associated with the colors of the rainbow itself (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, blue, purple). Similarly, you can try to memorize events, giving them associations. For example, while reading, imagine yourself walking down the street. Each word is some part of it. Thus, having placed the data along the route that you usually go for bread, you will then easily remember them. Each time for new information you need to come up with new routes.
The main thing is that memory training is fun, and also that you are aware of the need for it. Then next time you will not have to remember the name of the actor who played in the movie you just watched yesterday.