Arnott - Boost Your Brain Power: Proven Memory Tips, Tricks and Strategies for Improving Your Memory, Brain Power and Cognitive Functioning Today

Until recently,memory was viewed two ways.

One, it wasbelieved that memory was a fixed commodity. You either had a good memory, a badmemory, or a memory that fell somewhere in between.

It was believed tobe similar to other personal traits like hair or eye color. What you had atbirth is what you had to work with, period. People understood a good memory maybecome a bad memory for a variety of reasons, but it was not a common beliefthat a bad memory could become a better one.

Two, memory wasbelieved to be located in a distinct area of the brain. A popular notion wasthat memory was like a file cabinet, when recalling something the brain wouldopen up the drawer labelled memory and look for the file title with thememory (say wedding proposal) and read the file. If a person had a badmemory, the thought was that the filing system was in disarray or the file cabinetwas damaged causing memories to be lost in the system of the brain.

That was twentiethcentury thinking.

In thetwenty-first century, our knowledge about how the brain works has created a newmodel for how memory works. We will call this new memory model Memory 2.0.

Now, doctors andscientist understand that the brain is not simply a mass in the cranium. It isa muscle. Like other muscles in the body, the brain and its memory function canbe developed and improved with exercise. In fact, without regular exercise orstimulation the brain atrophies just like other muscles in the body that becomeweak and shrink without use.

As far as theconcept of the memory working like a fixed object, memory 2.0 does not worklike a file cabinet. In fact, memory is not a discrete part of the brain atall. While tasks like speech can be traced back to specific areas of the brain,memory is a brain-wide function. A stroke can cause a person to lose all orpart of the ability to speak or function in particular ways, but a stroke doesnot necessarily cause a persons memory to suffer. How is that possible? Well,memory is tied to connections made throughout the brain. The more connectionsassociated with a memory and made within the brain, the better the memoryperforms, even in situations where specific parts of the brain are damaged.This is one reason that a person who has Alzheimers disease can havedifficulty with some memory processes while maintaining a sharp recollection ofdistant memories or to those items that have a strong emotional tie. The factis, to improve your memory you need to simply improve the number and quality ofthe associations and connections you make with what you aim to remember.

Memory, as aprocess, is divided into two components: short term memory and long termmemory. Even as a memory is being created it is being processed, and meaning isbeing given.

This is part ofsurvival. Think about what would happen if a caveman had to stop, experience athreat, and then wait to process what it all meant before being able to defendhimself. Yes, if we had to stop and think about thinking, the human race wouldnever have survived. This almost instantaneous processing is indeed part of thememory process and it is called sensory memory.

The associationsmade while in the middle of an experience are connected to previous events andprior knowledge. The transition from sensory memory and perception toprocessing is part of your short term memory process. Short term memory is likea filter, deciding what is important and what is not, that holds informationfor a matter of seconds. If you have ever been in a situation when your mindhas wandered in class or in a business meeting only to be called on torecollect something the speaker just said, you have used your short term memorystorage of stimuli to reply (hopefully, correctly) with what was just covered.

While sensorymemory and short term memory quickly decay, a healthy brain has the ability tostore unlimited amounts of information indefinitely. This ability is calledlong term memory, which is what most people generally refer to as memory.Long term memory uses past experience to inform the current situation andprovides a pathway for the brain to remember the event as an associationbetween past and present for future reference and meaning.

Forgetting things,for a healthy person, is the result of one or more problems related to thethree Rs: registration, retention, or retrieval. Forgetting due to a problem inregistration is because of an issue with how you encoded the information in thefirst place. When you forget where you put your car keys, you have not reallyforgotten. Instead, you may have been distracted when you put them down, soyour brain did not encode the placement as being important. Similarly, if youalways put your keys in the same place, you may not be able to recall themoment you put them down in their proper place because the habitual nature ofthe act will cause your brain to register the act as not important enough tocreate a detailed or lasting memory.