What our memory is capable of

HTML

Neurophysiologist - about what tricks our memory is capable of

Briefly

A recent study showed that people began to count and write worse-because they do it less often because of gadgets. How do gadgets affect our memory?

We do not have a special device called "memory" - there are different types of memory. It is one thing, you remember your name, and another - when you remember the information. Each of us with varying degrees of success realizes these memory-something is better off, something worse.

This is not to say that gadgets spoil our memory. Of course, multiplying on the calculator, we do not train in the account. But I don't think this is a problem. Once we lived in the forest, and now in the world of gadgets. This means that people who spend a lot of time in gadgets will succeed in the world of gadgets. The content of the world has changed - now we survive in this.

It turns out that the meaning of memory, the very memorization skill, is overestimated?

Depending on what cases. If we do not distinguish the faces of people, it bothers us great, and we do not survive well in society. And if we cannot count in the mind, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

Of course, we need a memory, but everyone has its own: everyone develops in their own area - and in it it is easy for a person to learn and remember a new one. It is unlikely that the collector of brands complains that he cannot remember some information about these brands. Everything is simple for him there, he lives with this.

A universal exercise that simply improves memory does not exist - memory always has different content.

We can train her in letters, words, numbers. If we teach poetry, we will better remember poetry. Knowing a lot of poems, rhymes, some images, you will better remember all subsequent verses. But this will not help you remember the purchase list.

And if I teach a foreign language, will the poems help by heart?

No. Here, it will help to perceive the new language as it is perceived by a child who lives in an environment. After all, no one puts it and does not say it: today you must remember 20 senseless words. Quite the contrary. He uses words in context: sit down at the table, put a fork and so on.

That is, you need to tie new words to some situations. You may not know the exact meaning of the word, but you can say in what situation to use it.

What more affects a person and makes him remember: a visual image, sound?

We all perceive comprehensively. But if you begin to train to remember everything by ear, as the blind people do, you will be better to remember by ear. You will train to remember images - it will be so.

In this sense, smells are very interesting. We, as a rule, cannot describe them, but having heard some smell, we immediately remember some kind of situation. Maybe this happens because there are much more pictures than smells. Maybe because the smell and taste are the most ancient modalities that in ontogenesis the individual development of the body, the totality of consistent morphological, physiological and biochemical transformations from the moment of its appearance to the end of life .. develop the first.

We are used to quickly switching between tasks - social networks, correspondence. Does this affect our memory?

Yes, very much. All our memory is stored in neural groups. When you do something-for example, support this conversation-neural groups are activated. But so that we remember something, the activations should be quite long-from 20 minutes to an hour.

Because if you quickly thought about something and immediately switched to another, everything crumbled. And in the future you will not be able to recall some facts. And if you, without being distracted, have worked on one task for at least half an hour, then the neural group worked - and the chances of remembering already higher. The longer you do something, the more chances to remember this the next day.

Is the duration of actions necessary for memorization changing with age?

When you remember something, the brain forms a more or less stable nucleus of a neural group associated with a certain content. In older people, neurons are less stable.

This applies to a long -term long -term memory of a person is responsible for storing information for a long time - from several days to the whole of life. It has a huge volume, it contains learned skills, knowledge about the world and the whole experience of life in general. In memory, but also with a person’s working or RAM - a cognitive system of limited capacity, which ensures the temporary storage of information available for direct processing. The elderly has problems with memory, because it is associated with blood flow. Neurons, in principle, cannot work without blood flow. And if the blood flow in the brain is poor, then neurons cannot be sufficiently active. Because of this, memory worsens, and we cannot improve it if a person has poor vessels.

And normal blood flow is associated with physical activity, therefore, to improve memory, it is important to play sports.

If a person does not play sports, does not teach poetry and new words, this does not mean that he will not be able to remember anything at all?

Why? The USE it or lose it formula is just working here. There is evidence that all sorts of mental efforts still increase cognitive longevity.

There are different tricks like a nodule as a keepsake. Does it work?

We do not acquire a memory outside of some episode-and we acquire any knowledge within the framework of some episode. At first, we well remember this episode, but over time the details are falling off, and you have what we call a semantic (semantic) memory. Therefore, if you add some additional action to this episode that will allow you to return to this, yes, this can contribute to memorization.

In the same way, their mental "arrangement" in any space helps to remember the words. To do this, there are different mnemonics - for example, the “locus method” is the method to develop memory using visualization - creating a huge amount of information in the imagination of a space where you can “store”. For example, a person remembers a plan for a building or the location of stores on a certain street. When he needs to remember some fact, he mentally goes for a walk through these locations, associating this fact with them. .

The space for us is one of the most important things. Everything that is important, we tie to space. Our brain, evolving, remembered primarily the space and members of society. For survival, it is very important where you can find food, where you can find love, where it is good, where it is bad.

If it is difficult for you to remember anything, tie it to the space. For example, you are sitting at the table, teaching a list of words - the space around does not change. But if at the same time you mentally go around the apartment and put words in different places, this can contribute to the memorization of these words.

How is this explained?

The brain, of course, does not specifically remember the space. Now I am talking to you and moving in space, while certain neural groups are activated for me. Therefore, I will remember our conversation in the near future.

Then the details will fall off, and there will be a neural group that carries this memory. But this neural group changes its composition: it has a stable core, and the rest of the neurons can move.

If I recall our conversation in another place, then in the third, in the fourth, in different contexts - then I will forget faster, where I was at the time of our conversation. But then I will improve the memorization of the very fact of our conversation.

Each new memory of some episode can lead to its distortion. If you are dear to some memory, do not reproduce it.

And if you want to forget something as soon as possible-remember this as often as possible, in different settings, with different people. This is the so -called reconsolidation: each activation of our memory is its some reorganization. And the more we remember some episode, the further we go from the original. On this subject there are experiments one of the most famous experiments by Frederick Bartlett - the “war of the ghosts”. The scientist entrusted his participants in the English language of King Edward to read the folklore of indigenous Americans called the “war of the ghosts”. Participants were invited to remember this story many times through long periods of time. Bartlett discovered that with longer intervals between reading history and memorization, its participants were less accurate and forgot most of the information from history. Moreover, if the elements of the story did not fit into the listener's diagrams, he lowered them out of his memories or transformed them into more familiar forms. Psychologist Frederick Bartlett, he has a wonderful book of 1932 “Remembering”.

Such a mechanism can help a person live in traumatic events.

Actually, all the psychotherapy is built on this. Psychotherapy is updating memory, updating experience. To work out injury, you must reactivate your memories.

But there is a risk that implantation will happen - because the way we ask questions can change our memory. The psychologist and specialist in the study of memory of Elizabeth Loftus conducted an experiment . The subjects showed a video from an accident and after asking what they saw, changing the wording of questions. In one case, they simply said that “two cars collided”, in the other they used the word Smash (“in a cake”). Then they asked them if there were glasses in the place of an accident. “Witnesses” from the first group said that there were no glasses, and from the second - that there were glass. In fact, there were no glasses, but people were confused by the word "in a cake".

Episodic memory is very subject to distortion, and it can actually be replaced by the memory of other people.

The reason is the coincidence of the activity of neurons in time. If I ask a person to remember something, but in parallel I will supplement the process with my own stories, then two different neural groups can mix. And after some time, a person will begin to believe that it was so, and not otherwise.

You can learn to distinguish, where is the "right" memories?

No, today there are no ways to determine where the true memory is, and where - distorted relative to the original. Moreover, if a person himself often recalls some kind of event, he goes further from the original neural group-and then it seems to him that everything was like that.

Memories of a person cannot be trusted 100%, and this is a big problem - including for the investigation. Today you can fake a voice, video, photo. But it was always believed that witnesses are reliable. But it's even worse. They can be shifted. According to Elizabeth Loftus, 25% of the population is people who easily move in their memories. They can implant other people's memories.

How to live then?

It is better to forget everything. I don’t understand why people are chasing good memory. People with phenomenal memory would like to forget a lot of events, but cannot. I would say that “bad memory” is a normal memory.

It is believed that having a good memory is an achievement. But as if we are mixing memory and intelligence.

It seems to me that this is a big mistake. If we are talking about episodes that happen to us, then why do we need these memories?

And intelligence is a complex thing consisting of many pieces. In particular, it is believed that intelligence can be divided into two large types. One is the one called crystallized , this is our knowledge. The other is called mobile or fluid .

Crystallized is the intellect that everyone wants: to be erudites, remember everything, and so on. But today, if there are gadgets, it seems to me that there is no longer any sense in this.

And if we talk about fluid intelligence, he is responsible for the opportunity to use existing neural groups to solve new problems. It helps to “unleash” the experience in the mind, look at the problem from different angles. Such intelligence is associated with working memory, and it can be trained.

Even on the topic "Leave me the right to be a bad psychologist." How toxic specialists cripple the psyche of patients - and how to identify them and avoid

DEZHAVU-do people live differently? And where does it come from?

Where the dejavu comes from, no one can say firmly. It is quite difficult to study it: you need to put a person in a scanner and wait for deja vu to come to him.

There is an assumption that deja vu can be associated with a small epileptic focus: all the neurons earned in one local place, and it seems to you that this feeling visited you. This assumption is based on the fact that people with some types of epilepsy often experience a feeling of deja vu before an attack.

Most often we mean something else. The feeling when it seems to you that you were in this place - this is not deja vu. You probably really were in this place, but do not remember the details. At the same time, you remember the sensation associated with the activity of cortical neurons, which create this emotion. That's all. And the present deja vu is exactly the opposite, when you remember all the details and it seems to you that you have already lived exactly such an episode.

And if I know for sure that I was not in this place?

Then, probably, some details or emotions happened to a person in another place. But his memory was reorganized, and there is no longer any opportunity to activate the neural group, which was at the time of the experience, no longer. And you suddenly could feel some of the emotions now.

Is there any forecasts, what will be the memory of people of the alpha generation , people born from the beginning-in the 2010s of the 2010s in the mid-Coles of the 2020s. which grow literally with the phone in their hands? What if they will not be able to remember anything but their name?

I don't think so. Our brain is so arranged that it constantly produces some kind of activation and is ready to remember the new one. If you do not specifically kill your neurons with all sorts of substances, then the brain will remember any novelty that happens to you. If you are in gadgets all the time, then you will have a good memory in this area.

And if a person does not go anywhere, but only sits and watches vidosiki about new countries, he still has new neural groups about these countries - just these are flat. Minus food, minus smell, minus something else. Is it good or bad?

Maybe there will be some technologies that will help activate certain neurons of our brain and live the whole complex of sensations. Theoretically, this can be imagined - as in the "matrix". And by the way, there is no evidence that we are not in the matrix.

And if it turns out that we are in the matrix, what then?

So what? I really like my life. This is just the activity of my neurons.