Some Interesting Facts About Memory

Some Interesting Facts About Memory
by Dr Yip Swe Chooi

Q1) What is memory?

People often talk about their memory as though their memory is an object that can be possessed. Memory isn’t something that can be seen, touched or weighed like an object. It is a mental process and not something you can hold in your hand.

Q2) How does our memory work?

We remember things by association. Each piece of information is linked to other information in some way or another. The more you know about a particular topic the easier it is to remember or to learn new things about that topic because you have more “hooks” for the new information to hook on.

Q3) Why do most of us have a bad memory?

The truth is that most of us have a good memory. The memory performance does not match the potential is because we do not practice using it efficiently or we do not learn memory techniques to remember better.

Q4) How can we learn to remember better?

Since memory works by association, create an association between the information will enable us to remember better. For example, if you want to remember the following list:

hamburger-refrigerator-car-dictionary-
tiger-chair-radio-pencil

All you have to do is to visualize in your mind:

1. a hamburger shivering inside a refrigerator
2. a refrigerator is put inside a car.
3. a car crashes onto a giant dictionary.
4. a dictionary with pictures of tigers.
5. a tiger is sitting on a chair
6. a chair with a radio hanging on it.
7. turn on the radio with a pencil.

If you can form vivid associations, you will be surprised how easy it is to remember the list. The idea is to be creative and visualize in your mind the associations that connect the information together.

Q5) How can we visualize intangible words?

Substituting intangible words with other concrete words or phrases facilitate visualization and thus makes it easier to remember. There are two ways to substitute words without “built in image”.

1. substitute with things or words that are in some ways related to the intangible words.
e.g. education --- school
France --- Eiffel Tower

2. substitute with words that have similar phonetic sounds.
e.g. taciturn --- taxi turns
Portugal --- Port two girls

Q 6) How much information can we remember?

The storage capacity of the human brain is virtually limitless. It was estimated that the number of patterns nerve cells could form was 1 followed by 800 zeroes. Other researchers estimate that even this number is too small. This means that our brains will never “fill up” with information.

Q 7) Does the adage “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” apply to older adults as well?

Actually, the more accurate saying is : ‘The quickest way to become an old dog is to quit learning new tricks.’ Our memory becomes less efficient as we grow older and thus, older adults may not learn as quickly as their younger peers. On the other hand, older adults have a lot more structures and more retrievable information to compare new experiences to. The rich experience and knowledge base help many older adults to perform mental tasks at the same or higher levels as young adults. However, there are many negative effects of aging, such deterioration of the neuronal pathways, and sedentary lifestyle that may impede the ability to remember things.

It is essential that older people enjoy an active social life in order to maintain their memory. A recent study has shown that elderly people who took part in learning new things had higher performance in unrelated memory tasks.