10 interesting unusual things about memory that people should know

Many people say they have poor memory, but most are wrong. The way memory works can be surprising, frustrating, strange - but not necessarily "poor".

For most of us, the problem is not in our memory, but in our understanding of how memory works.

Here are 10 interesting unusual things of memory that give a better understanding of what makes us remember - or forget.

1. Background is king

What we can remember depends in part on our situation and mental state at the time. That's because our memory works by association.

The context itself may refer to all kinds of things: some things are easier to remember in a certain place, others are easier to remember when we experience specific smells, or when we have special emotional states.

One study demonstrates this by requiring divers to learn a list of words that are either 15ft underwater or on land (Godden & Baddeley, 1975).

It turned out that when they learned the words underwater, they remembered 32% of the number when they were underwater, but only remembered 21% when tested on land.

Of course our memory is much more complex than the list of words. But research confirms that for memory the context is very important.

2. Google remembers helping you

If you ever worry about the impact of the internet on your mind, this aspect of memory seems to increase those worries.

"Google effect" is a discovery that shows that we tend to forget things we know we can search on the internet.

In a study by Sparrow et al. (2011) participants were controlled to think that they could either find items they were asked to recall from a computer, or deleted items.

The results show that people's memory is worse for things they think they can search for.

The important thing is, despite the fact that people's memory is worse when they can access information, they know more about where that information was found.

Assuming you can search almost anything on the internet, does that mean we will eventually forget almost everything?

The author of the study, Betsy Sparrow, sees this as a reorganization of the way we remember things:

'Our brain relies on the internet to remember very similar to how we rely on the memory of a friend, a family member or a colleague. We remember less information itself than remember where the information can be found. "

Thus, this is not a step back, but an evolution in the way memory works.

3. Negative emotions lose faster

On average, negative emotions are forgotten faster than positive emotions.

One study asked people to write about what happened to them over a period of months.

They were then asked to recall those events five years later.

A strange thing happens to most people (not-depressed): negative events are forgotten at a higher rate than positive events.

Psychologists don't know exactly why this happens, but it seems to be part of our natural psychological immune system, helping protect us against inevitable blows of life. .

4. Deeply handled

The fact is that the more an event or memory is dealt with deeply, the greater the likelihood of the event being remembered later.

A classical study requires people to try to remember a list of words (Craik & Tulving, 1975).

Some people are asked to focus on external details, such as the sounds of words or how they are written. The other group must handle the meaning of the words.

You will be surprised to know that those who have thought about the meaning of the words did the best in a later test.

Look for deeper connections than a way to make strong memories in your mind.

5. The distortion of memories

When a memory is "wrongly attributed" some authentic initial aspect of a memory becomes distorted through time, space or circumstances.

Some examples studied in the laboratory are:

Misleading the origin of memories. In one study, participants with "normal" memories often made the mistake of thinking that they obtained a normal event from a newspaper, while in fact the experimentalists provided give them that event (Schacter, Harbluk, & McLachlan, 1984).

Incorrectly assign a face to the wrong context. Studies show that memories can be mixed together, so faces and contexts are intertwined.

Memory expert Daniel Schacter thinks that the wrong rules can be useful for us (Schacter, 1999).

The ability to draw, abstract and generalize our experience allows us to apply the lessons we have learned in one area to another.

6. Zeigarnik effect

The Zeigarnik effect is named after a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, who noticed a strange thing while sitting at a restaurant in Vienna.

The waiters seem to remember only the coupons that are being served. When finished, the food coupons disappear from their memory.

Zeigarnik returned to the lab to test a theory of what was going on.

She asked the participants to perform 20 or very simple tasks in the lab (Zeigarnik, 1927). Sometimes they are interrupted during the task.

Then she asked them what tasks they remembered to do. People can memorize the tasks they have been interrupted more than twice as much as the tasks they completed.

The Zeigarnik effect says that unfinished tasks are better remembered for completed tasks.

7. Early childhood forgetfulness

Most adults cannot recall most, if not anything, from before 3 years old.

That's what Sigmund Freud first called in the term "childhood forgetfulness".

A new study of childhood memories reveals that childhood amnesia starts around 7 years old (Bauer & Larkina, 2013).

The results show that between 5 and 7 years of age, children can recall about 63% and 72% of the events they first recalled at 3 years of age.

However, at about 8 or 9 years of age, children only recall about 35% of events.

As a child, seahorses - a part of the brain that is important for memory - is still producing neurons: new neurons are constantly being born.

Until this process is completed, we find it difficult to store long-term memories of ourselves.

8. The strong turn of memory

Although we can recall very little from about before 7 years of age, the age of adolescence and early adulthood is a completely different matter.

From between 10 and 30 years old, most adults experience some of the biggest moments of their lives. It is learning, puberty, beginning to love, deciding on a career, getting married, having a first child .

Although the later years of their lives may be full of happiness and satisfaction, it is two decades that most people experience the greatest changes with psychological identity, goals and their living conditions.

Therefore people tend to remember this most intense period - that is "a strong memory" ; Named after a strong turn on the graph of restoring memories of human self (red).

9. Consistent bias

New experiences do not fall into an empty board; We are not simply recording the things we see around us.

Instead, everything we do, think or experience, is affected by past thoughts and things that happened to us.

A strong psychological motivation of that person is to become consistent.

This can lead to consistency bias: we have a tendency to rebuild the past to make it more relevant to our current worldview.

For example, when people get older, on average, they become more politically conservative.

10. Recall effect

Many memories seem genuine, but it turns out to be false, if not all fictional events, if we can check.

But, does the long run of time mislead memory, or does some process cause this change?

In one experiment, participants had memories stored in a carefully controlled way to test this (St. Jacques & Schacter, 2013).

The results show that human memories are both enhanced and distorted by the recall process. This shows that simply remembering a memory is enough to reinforce it.

This is one aspect of the fact that memory is a proactive, rebuilding process; remembering something is not a neutral act, it makes that memory stronger than other memories.

The hope is that these "abnormalities" of memory underscore the fact that some things we think of as disadvantages of memory are actually strong points.