How does human memory work?
Memory isn't just something that happens in your brain.You can't just
There are many processes in the human brain,most of them are still being studied. For example, those that determine how and why memories are stored and how they are recalled. Scientists, particularly neuroscientists, have known for years that a person's condition—young or old, stressed or not—can interfere with or facilitate the process of encoding memory in the mind.
Now something else is starting to become clear.When a person forgets something, it is not because his memory is “poor.” What's actually happening is the brain is being reorganized so it can focus on more important things. There are even leading theories that the brain stores in memory everything that has ever happened to you. It simply forms neural pathways to memories that it deems important.
This may seem crazy, but there are good reasonsevidence for this theory, reports Interesting Engineering. There are certain clinical disorders that cause people to remember everything that has ever happened to them. Like the boy in the video below:
Memories, or rather neural pathways, thatused to evoke them, intensify each time we recall certain events in memory. Actively practicing memory retrieval, such as studying for an exam, will improve your brain's ability to remember.
So how, then, can we better remember something if we already understand the basic principle?
The best ways to remember
Several studies by leading psychologists andneuroscientists show that taking quizzes, practicing and successfully memorizing something is much better than trying to memorize something. In these studies, students specifically used various memorization tools to learn words in a foreign language.
Some groups simply learned translations of words.Others used various techniques. 7 days after the start of the experiment, those students who did not use any techniques had learned 25% of the words or below. Other students learned 80% of the words. Based on evidence, the researchers concluded that learning techniques such as flashcards or ongoing questioning help students retain memories. These same principles can be applied to fixing memories in your head.
There is another method that appeared in ancient Greece, and thanks to the character of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it became discussed and Nowadays.
What are the memorization techniques?
- Working memory training
Working memory (WM), also known asOperational is the set of processes that allow us to store and temporarily use information for the purpose of performing complex cognitive tasks such as understanding language, reading, using mathematics, learning, or reasoning. Working memory is one of the types of short-term memory.
According to the Baddeley and Hitch model, working memory consists of three systems and includes components for both storing and processing information:
Central control element:works as an attention monitoring system,which decides what we pay attention to and what we don’t, and also organizes the sequence of actions that need to be performed to carry out the activity.
Phonological loop:allows us to retain written and spoken material in memory.
Visuospatial sketch:helps us manage and retain visual information.
Episodic buffer:used to integrate information from the phonological loop and visuospatial sketch, construct a coherent episode, and to link to long-term memory.
We use a working (or operational)memory when performing various kinds of tasks. When trying to remember a phone number before writing it down. When we engage in a conversation, we need to keep in mind what we just said in order to process this information and express our point of view. When at school or university we take notes on lectures, we need to remember what the teacher said, so that later we can write it down in our own words. When we count in our mind the cost of our purchases in the supermarket in order to understand if we have enough money.
- The method of loci or "palaces of memory"
Method of loci (other names - method of places,palace of memory, palaces of the mind, spatial mnemonics) is a mnemonic (that is, helping the development of memory) method, set out in ancient Roman treatises on rhetoric. Based on mental-spatial associations, the purpose of which is to create, organize and further use the entire contents of human memory. The use of this method of organizing and storing information can be seen in many works on psychology and neuroscience, despite the fact that it was also used in the first half of the 19th century in works on rhetoric, logic and philosophy.
Almost all the nuances of memory training known to us from the times of antiquity were described between 86 and 82. BC e. in the short anonymous textbook "Rhetoric for Herennius".
The loci method is often referred to as "mentala walk. " In essence, the method consists in developing memory through visualization: creating in your imagination a space in which you can store a huge amount of information. In other words, a person remembers, for example, a plan of a building or the location of shops on a certain street, or other geographical objects consisting of a certain number of different locations (places). When a person using the described method needs to memorize any facts, he kind of goes for a walk through the locations mentioned above and associates a fact (for example, a number that needs to be remembered) with one of the objects of his “memory chambers”, by forming a kind of image, logically combining a fact required for memorization and a distinctive feature of the location (for example, a room in a palace or an object in this room).
This method is often used in competitions.mnemonics, when the contestants have to memorize 500 different numbers in 15 minutes or a sequence of 100 objects, which takes only a few seconds to memorize.
Just watch the video below to see how effective this technique is at memorizing thousands of pi digits.
Since 1991, World Championships have been heldmemorization. The first one, held in London, was won by Briton Dominic O'Brien. Currently, competitions are held in 30 countries around the world in the following disciplines: abstract images, words, names and faces, speed cards, sequence of cards per hour, speed numbers, numbers per hour, binary numbers for speed, historical dates, numbers by ear . Often, processes that play a key role in memory work encounter problems of a psychological and physiological nature.
Scientists decided to finally test in a clinical setting which memorization method is better.
Exploring the "chambers of memory"
Sherlock Holmes remembers everything by imagining thatstores pieces of information in “memory halls”. Now researchers have discovered that this method actually works for creating long-lasting memories.
According to a study published in ScienceAdvances, by training with this method, the world's top memory champions can memorize an inordinate amount of information such as word lists, series of numbers, and decks of cards. But at the World Memory Championships, only short-term memory is tested, and only a few studies have examined the brain, as people use this method to improve memory.
“We were fascinated by how such things were possibleoutstanding memory performance, which was demonstrated at the World Memory Championships,” said lead author Isabella Wagner, a female cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Vienna.
According to her, the method of loci useswell-known places or routes as a “frame” or “structure” for embedding new, unrelated information. The combination of prior knowledge—a familiar path—and new information helps improve memory.
To evaluate the loci method, Wagner and her teamattracted 17 "memory champions" - people who made it to the top 50 memory competitions in the world, and 16 people who were of the right age and intelligence. The researchers performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the participants' brains, asking them to examine random words from a list. The researchers then gave the participants three words from the list and asked them to recall if the words were in the same order as previously studied.
In the second part of the study, they scored 50participants with no previous experience in mnemonics and trained 17 of them to recall memories using the loci method over a six-week period. The rest of the participants were in the control group (16 of them were trained using a different mnemonic tactic - “working memory training”, and 17 people did not train at all). They scanned the participants' brains again with fMRI as they performed the same tasks both before and after training. The researchers also asked them to recall which words were on the list 20 minutes and 24 hours after they were scanned with fMRI.
The team used this test to determine“Faint memories,” or those that could be recalled after 20 minutes, but not after 24 hours, and “persistent memories,” or those that could be recalled after 24 hours. Four months later, researchers re-tested the participants' ability to memorize and recall words.
What's the bottom line?
As expected, the participants showed the best andlonger lasting memory after training with the loci method than after training with a different memory technique or no technique at all. Participants who trained according to the ancient method showed a significant increase in long-term memories, but not a significant change in faint memories (or short-term memories that disappeared after 20 minutes) compared to control groups.
After 20 minutes, people who have been trained by the methodloci, remembered about 62 words from the list, while those who studied using a different method remembered 41, and those who did not train at all, remembered 36. After 24 hours the word people trained using the loci method memorized about 56 words versus 30 and 21 in the control groups, respectively.
Four months later, people trained in the methodloci, could memorize about 50 words against 30 and 27 in the control groups, respectively. What's more, world memory champions and participants who trained with the loci method showed similar brain activity when memorizing lists of words and their order.
The team also came across something unexpected:while both world champions and participants performed these tasks, their brain activity decreased in areas normally associated with memory processing and long-term memory, Wagner told Live Science. “This was somewhat unexpected for us, as better performance is usually associated with increased involvement of various areas of the brain,” she said.
In other words, they found that lessbrain activation leads to better memory. It seems that the loci method encourages the brain to work more efficiently. In addition, while the participants were resting, those who were trained in the loci method had increased brain connections between other causes important for long-term memory preservation.
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Pi is a mathematical constant that expresses the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Equal to approximately 3.141592653589793238462643…
Functional magnetic resonance imaging,Functional MRI or fMRI is a type of magnetic resonance imaging that is used to measure hemodynamic responses (changes in blood flow) caused by neural activity in the brain or spinal cord. This method is based on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activity are related. When an area of the brain is active, blood flow to that area also increases. fMRI allows us to determine the activation of a specific area of the brain during normal functioning under the influence of various physical factors (for example, body movement) and under various pathological conditions.
Mnemonics, mnemotechnics - a setspecial techniques and methods that facilitate the memorization of necessary information and increase memory capacity by forming associations (connections): replacing abstract objects and facts with concepts and ideas that have a visual, auditory or kinesthetic representation, linking objects with already existing information in memory of various types of modification to simplify memorization.