Things I Wish I Learned Sooner: Memory and Surprising Ways To Train Its Efficiency
Easier Memorization
Memory is the pattern of neural activity that represents the sights, sounds, smells, feelings, information, and language you experienced when you learned something and is reactivated as a neural circuit in your brain.
It has been proven that the release of adrenaline (epinephrine) improves the memorization of information.
The depth of memorization is correlated with the amount of the hormone being released and at which point of time.
You can get it up either through the material itself, be it an emotional text or simply interesting facts or through physical activities like cold showers, sports or a special event AFTER studying.
How Our Brain Connects Data
There is a physical place where we process vision, speech or movement.
But memory is different.
Memory is located throughout the brain, in all the different places involved in what memory is made of.
So the circuit, memory, involves the activation of neurons in very different places.
Our hippocampus is our memory weaver.
This is the part of the brain that links the impressions, the sounds, the smells, the feelings, the language and the information together so that they become a neural circuit.
Our human brain is pretty phenomenal at remembering meaningful, emotional, surprising or new, and repetitive things.
We are pretty bad at remembering what is always the same, what has already been there, what has already been done, what is not emotional, and what is not repetitive.
Our brain is also very good at remembering visual things and where those things are in space. In evolution, it was very important for our survival to be able to remember where there is food, where we are safe, and where predators live.
Semantic memory includes facts and dates, the information you learned in school: six times six, who was the first president, that kind of information.
Also our biographical information, birthplace, address, and phone number. So when we talk about semantic memory, it’s pretty stable and accurate.
Muscle memory is similarly stable over time.
It is located in the motor cortex.
This part of your brain tells all the voluntary muscles in your body what to do.
Muscle memory is the memorized choreography, the procedure of how to do something — how to brush your teeth, how to swing a golf club, how to eat an ice cream cone.
Episodic memory is a little different.
It’s your memory of things that happened, it’s the story of your life. It’s an “oh, I remember when.”
It turns out that every time we recall a memory of something that happened, we have the opportunity to change it.
Often unconsciously. We may add a detail. We may leave out a detail.
If someone else experienced the same event, they may add information that we agree with. And so we add that to our memory.
As humans, we are also born storytellers. So if there is information missing from my story, or if I could embellish it to make the story better, give it a nice beginning, middle and end, I might add that without knowing that I am deliberately lying.
I only give information that makes sense to tell the story that happened.
There is another type of memory called prospective memory.
This is your memory for your future self. This is your brain’s to-do list.
Pick up the laundry, pay the bills, oh, I have to remember to call my mom later.
And that’s not what our brain is designed for.
Prospective memory is riddled with errors. If you don’t have the right cue at the right time and place, you will forget.
So the more we know about the biology of memory, the science of memory, the more we can develop a better relationship with it.
Your identity is so closely related to your memory capacity. When people meet you, the first question they ask you is often, “What do you do?” “Where are you from?” “Tell me about your family.”
The answers to all these questions depend on memory. Your ability to remember events, the story of your life, is what we claim about ourselves.
Would It Be Possible To Implant Completely False Memories?
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus recruited a sample of participants and had her team contact their families to obtain information about events in their past.
Using this information, the researchers put together four stories about the participants’ childhood.
Three of them were true — The fourth story contained plausible information but was fictitious.
The fourth story was about being lost in a mall as a child, being found by a kind older person, and eventually being reunited with a parent.
In a series of interviews, participants were told the four stories.
At least a quarter of respondents said they could remember the mall incident — even if it hadn’t actually happened.
Loftus explains, “They may start to remember it a little bit. But when they come back a week later, they remember more. Maybe then they’ll talk about the older woman who saved them.”
Over time, more and more crept into the false memory: “The old woman wore this crazy hat”; “I had my favorite toy with me”; “My mother was so angry.”
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