Memory And Playback: 10 Surprising Facts You Should Know

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

They say that a person is the sum of his memories. Our experience is what makes us who we are. People often say that they have a bad memory. This is partly because we are comparing human memory with computer memory, and such a comparison is incorrect. A person's memory is more complex and bizarre compared to the memory of his gadgets.

1. Memory does not deteriorate. Everyone knows the confusion of not being able to remember someone's name, street name or parking lot. Therefore, it seems that memory is deteriorating, just as the fruit decays over time. But various studies are not inclined to confirm this opinion. Instead, there is evidence that memory has limitless potential. Everything is stored there, without exception, it is just more difficult to get to some memories. This means that it is not memory that is corrupted, but the ability to access memories. But why keep all this data in your head if it is impossible to get it from there? But why -

2. By forgetting, you get the opportunity to learn something new. The idea that forgetting helps you learn seems meaningless, but think about this. Imagine that you have created an ideal brain that not only remembers everything, but can reproduce everything. When this amazing brain tries to remember where the car is parked, it will have to remember and go over in its mind all the parking lots it has ever seen. Obviously, the information about the last seen parking lots will be of the greatest interest, and the same is generally true for all other memories. Recent events tend to be more important than those that happened many years ago. Therefore, in order to make your super brain faster and more useful in real life, you have to create a system for storing old useless data. By the way, we all have a super brain with a system for storing discounted information. We call her - forgetting … This is why forgetting helps us learn: as less useful information is pushed aside, we are naturally left with the knowledge we need to survive on a daily basis

3. The so-called "lost" memory can be returned. Another proof that memory does not deteriorate. Although earlier memories become less accessible, they can be recovered. Research has shown that even information that has become unavailable a long time ago can be recovered. Moreover, the retraining of this knowledge is much faster than the assimilation of new information. It's like you will never forget how to ride a bike, it turns out that this is not only about motor skills, but also any memories.

4. Referring to memories changes them. While this is a fundamental principle of memory, the very idea that recourse to memories can change them seems completely wrong. How can the process of remembering change what we remember? For example, simply returning in memory to some event, we make it brighter than similar memories, thus giving it greater significance. Let's take a look at this example. Let's say you go back to one particular birthday as a child and remember that you were given an electric railroad. Every time you remember this fact, the rest of the gifts you received that day pale in comparison to the train. Thus, the process of remembering is actually a process of actively constructing the past, or at least the part of the past that you are remembering. And that is not all. False memories are created by misrepresenting the past, which raises the fascinating idea that we create ourselves by choosing what to remember from the past.

5. The memory is not stable. The fact that a simple memory alters memory indicates that memory is not stable. Contrary to this, people tend to believe that memory is quite stable: we forget that we have forgotten something, at the same time believing that we will not forget in the future what we know now. This means that students seriously underestimate the amount of effort required to restore knowledge in memory. They are not alone in this misconception, which leads us to understand the following effect, called

6. Anticipated substitutionEveryone has this experience. You have a great idea, and it is so beautiful that you are sure that there is no chance that you can forget it. Therefore, you do not write it down. And ten minutes later you have already forgotten it, with no chance of ever remembering. Scientists have observed similar situations in the laboratory. In one study conducted in 2005, subjects were asked to memorize pairs of words, such as "light - lamp". They were then asked to rate the likelihood that they would respond with a lamp when they were later told the word "light." In the overwhelming majority of cases, the subjects were overly optimistic and self-confident. The reason for this is the so-called foreseeable substitution (shift). Later, when they heard the word "light", many other words came to their minds, such as "shadow" or "light bulb". And remembering the correct answer turned out to be not at all as easy as they expected. 7. What is easily remembered is poorly learnedWe seem to ourselves very smart when we instantly remember something, and we feel slow-witted when remembering takes time. But from the point of view of learning, we must perceive everything exactly the opposite. What quickly comes to mind without effort on our part is less learned by heart. If you need to work hard to refresh something in your memory, something wonderful happens - we learn. Learning requires enhanced memories.

8. Learning largely from context (environment)Have you noticed that when you learn something in the same environment, for example, in a classroom, it can be difficult to remember the same when the environment changes. This is due to the fact that learning largely depends on how and where you learn: who is with you, what surrounds you, how you perceive the material. It turns out that in the long run, people absorb information better when they receive it in different ways or in different environments and contexts.

9. The memory is reloaded. Let's say you want to learn how to play tennis, but what's the best way to do it? The first week you learn to serve, the second week - to hit back punches from the left, in the third - from the right, and so on, or combine everything together and on the same day try and serve and hit back punches from different sides. It turns out that in the long term, knowledge is assimilated better if the training is combined, versatile. This rule works equally well for motor skills such as tennis and semantic information such as the capital of Venezuela. (By the way, this is Caracas) The problem is that it is much more difficult to start learning this way. In relation to tennis, it would look like this: as soon as you try to serve, you immediately move on to learning the technique of hitting the right and begin to "forget" how to serve. Therefore, you feel like learning is harder and slower than if you applied over and over again, although such blended learning is more beneficial for long-term memory. And only the memory reload hypothesis can explain why it works like that. Such a reboot helps to assimilate the acquired knowledge more firmly.

10. We can control our learningIf we put these facts about memory into practice, we will find that we underestimate our impact on learning. Moreover, many people believe that they are naturally difficult to train and therefore give up quickly. However, techniques such as using different contexts, switching between tasks, and tense recall of knowledge can help everyone learn. People also think that what we know about our past is unchanged, but how we remember the past and what we think about it can be changed. Returning to memories in a different way can help you rethink the past and change your choices in the future.

Research has shown that people are able to supplant painful, difficult memories by focusing on lighter and more positive ones. In general, our memory is not as poor as we imagine. It may not work like a computer, but this is what makes it incredibly interesting to learn and understand.