SOME SURPRISING FACTS ABOUT HUMAN MEMORY

 A rough calculation by Paul Reber, Professor of psychology at Northwestern University, suggests that the brain can store 2.5 PETABYTES of data, that’s 2,500,000 Gigabytes, or 3000 years worth of TV.

Paul Reber

Did you ever encounter a situation in which you entered a room and immediately forgot the reason to go there?

It is one of the strange memory lapses, caused by doorways, i.e. when you go through different doorways.

Sleep is important to increase memory power, although scientists don’t know exactly how it affects the brain. It has been shown that sleep aids storage and retrieval of Long Term Memory.

Your memory can associate a scent with a certain event of occurrence. A smell can trigger the memory in your mind associated with it.

Caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant that is said to increase mental alertness, but it cannot maintain the memory performance.

Scientific research has shown that the human brain starts remembering things from the womb, memory begins to work 20 weeks after conception.

Transient global amnesia is a rare condition characterized by the brain fog temporary loss of memory.

There are a number of factors that influence memory and give it a corresponding name, such as visual memory and auditory memory, which we discussed earlier.

The hippocampus is part of the brain largely responsible for the formation of new memories and directly interacts with our sense of smell.

You will be surprised to note that aging does not have a direct effect on memory, and the loss of memory is simply because you use it less as you age

There is such a thing as “false memory”

Researchers are beginning to understand that the human mind can create, exaggerate, distort, or re-invent a memory after a traumatic experience or something that impacted them greatly.

One obviously good way of doing this is to prioritise information by it’s emotional intensity.

As is the case with any other organ in the body, the brain needs adequate exercise for the proper functioning of memory, i.e. harder thinking will facilitate the permanent storage of information. It is because thinking helps in creation of a stronger connection among the neurons.

The brain processes a huge amount of data every day, so clearly it needs some kind of triage system for determining what is important stuff that needs to be remembered.