Archive for the 'Memory Management' Category

Using a method to help us learn something we want to remember is another way we can make the most of our memory. Internal memory techniques have been around for centuries, so long in fact that one researcher was impelled to call memory improvement “one of the world’s oldest professions.”

The ancient Greeks wrote extensively about the use of internal memory techniques, many of which are the same techniques employed today. Performers who show feats of memory use such techniques to wow audiences with their skill.

Why, then, have so many people found these methods annoying and, quite frankly, more of a obstruction than a help? Actually, the problem is not with the methods themselves, but rather with the way in which they have been taught.

Memory enhancement experts in the past have offered memory systems that are difficult to learn and troublesome to use. Techniques such as the peg or loci technique are great for people who want “super” memories.

The Rhyme Technique

Many people like to help themselves remember information by making up a rhyme for it. While the Rhyme Technique needs a lot of creative energy and a sure talent, all students who like it really take to it.

The memories that concern us in everyday life, whether they are implicit memories or explicit memories are far removed from nerve cells, just as our everyday world of cars, food, and people is far removed from the atoms that make them up.

Nerve Cells

Activity is electrical, by releasing chemicals, nerve cells communicate with each other. This chemical release is a heritage of our past. When our ancestors were all just single cells, the only way to communicate was by releasing chemicals into primordial oceans.

Later, as groups of multiple cells organized into primitive animals, the easiest way for cells to get messages across to one another was still to put out chemicals into the fluid that bathed them all. It appears that they adopted this existing transmission system for their own use, when nerve cells developed.

Neurotransmitter

In some cases, these chemicals have maintained some of the functions that they once had. In others, the functions have been customized beyond recognition. For instance, the chemical people commonly know as adrenaline is actually a neurotransmitter as well. But it can get released into the blood when a special gland, the adrenal gland, gets stimulated.

Stress id another lifestyle factor that can really zap your memory power. Feeling stressed is of course just another part of being human. But devastating stress can take a terrific toll on our overall health, not to mention our memory.

Stress

For most of us stress is a feeling of pressure and lack of control. Yet formally stress is defined as merely the way you react to change. Stress in and of itself is not problematic. In fact, both “good” and “bad” life events are stressful. What distinguishes “good” stress from “bad” stress (distress) is the degree to which we feel we are in control.

For instance, most people would consider losing their job as more stressful than getting married. It is the sense of the former being more out of your control that makes it more distressful.

Don’t Let Stress Zap Your Memory!

You return from a much-needed week’s holiday in the tropics where you didn’t take your laptop. You are relaxed, suntanned, and your wife’s hero for making a hat out of palm fronds and ordering dinner in broken Tahitian.

Are all memories created equal? It is almost certain that different people have different brain capabilities for different things. One of these differences must be in memory. But most of the differences in memory capabilities that we see in everyday life do not seem to be due to differences in the brains we are born with, but to differences in how well we use the brains we are born with.

Our brains are perhaps somewhat like our muscles: everybody is born with different amounts of muscle. And this is perhaps mostly true of the muscle that is your heart. So it is likely that some people have bigger, stronger hearts than others do at birth.

But it is also true that many people can take whatever amount of heart they are born with - large or small—and train themselves up from couch potato to marathon runner. The dissimilarities we find in everyday memory probably are similar.

They are probably still mostly based on how much we exercise what we have, not how much memory we are born with. This is not to diminish the fact that different people may be born with different memory abilities.

Memory - Meaning

Memory is not just remembering what you ate for breakfast or the name of the President. It is remembering your train of thought, where you are going and why, where you are, and what you are doing at any given moment.

It is remembering how to put a sentence together, turn on your computer, spell a word, balance your checkbook, and what someone has just said. But many men and women complain that they are sometimes not capable to do these things.

They are all of a sudden rereading things over and over in order to get the meaning, not finding things that are right in front of them, calling their sons by their husband or wife’s name, stashing their socks in the freezer, and becoming clumsy, awkward, and, for lack of a better word, “ditzy.”

You need memory to hold on to your thoughts and ideas long enough to organize them. But your capability to communicate your thoughts to others breaks down, if they slip away like quicksilver before you have the chance to arrange them in a logical sequence.

The subject of Memory Improvement is not a new one by any means. There has been much thought devoted to the subject for at least, for two thousand years. Many methods or “systems” invented and many books written thereupon, the purpose of which has been the artificial training of the memory improvement.

Instead of attempting for memory improvement by scientific training and rational practice and exercise along natural lines, there seems to have always been an idea that one could improve memory on Nature’s methods, and that a plan might be devised by the use of some ” trick”‘ the memory might be taught to give up her hidden treasures.

The ancient Greeks were fond of memory systems. Simonides, the Greek poet who lived about 500 B. C. was one of the early authorities, and his work has prejudiced nearly all of the many memory systems.

Story Behind The Theory

There is a romantic story linked with the foundation of his memory system. It is related that the poet was present at a large banquet attended by some of the principal men of the place. He left before the close of the meal because he was called out by a message from home.

Many persons seem to be under the feeling that memories are bestowed by nature, in a fixed degree or possibilities, and that little more can be done for them. In brief, that memories are born not made.

But the misleading notion of any such idea is demonstrated by the investigations and experiments of all the leading authorities, as well as by the results obtained from the persons who have developed their own memories by their own effort without the help of an instructor.

But all such improvement to be real must be along specific natural lines and in accordance with the well-established laws of psychology, instead of along artificial lines and in disobedience of psychological principles. Development of the memory is a far different thing from ” trick memory.”

Dr. Noah Porter

Dr. Noah Porter says: “The natural memory as opposed to the artificial memory depends on the relations of thought and the relations of sense, the impulsive memory of the eye and the par benefiting itself of the clear combinations of objects which are furnished by space and time, and the rational memory of those higher combinations which the rational faculties super induce upon those lower.

Artificial Systems Of Memory Improvement

The law of Association has been used in the majority of these memory improvement systems, often to an outrageous degree. Fanciful systems have been built up, which were artificial in their character and nature.

To a great extent the use of these systems is calculated to result in a decrease of the natural powers of remembrance and recollection, just as in the case of natural “aids” to the physical system there is always found a decrease in the natural powers.

Natural Systems Of Memory Improvement

Nature prefers to do her own work, without help. She may be trained, led, directed and harnessed, but nature insists upon doing the task herself, or dropping the task. The significant memory system, which forms a part of natural memory training is the principle of association, and should be so used.

But this principle of association results is the erection of a complex and unnatural mental mechanism when pressed into service in many of the artificial systems, which is no more a memory improvement in the natural ways, than a wooden leg is an improvement upon the original limb.