Right now! Right away! Think back to what you ate at noon the day before yesterday.
……
If you can't think of it all at once, then... Congratulations!
Wait, why congratulations?
In daily life, we often get upset about forgetting information, fantasizing about how nice it would be if we could do it! Why did we evolve brains capable of complex reasoning, but not stronger memories?
Image credit: veer gallery
Forgetting, perhaps, is also our "superpower"
In fact, we should be more fortunate that we have the ability to forget, because forgetting can reduce the cognitive load brought by memory and make cognition more efficient, which is a beneficial side effect of the efficient work of the cognitive system with limited ability.
Perhaps some hints can be seen from a few examples:
Solomon Shereshevskii is a journalist with the ability to "dream" of people. He could easily remember a long list of numbers, but he couldn't find the law of the string of numbers. His mind was filled with isolated facts, but he could not summarize some common patterns and organize them, which led to his inability to understand metaphors, metaphors, poems, and even more complex sentences.
World Memory Master, Dominic O'Brien, is a globally recognized genius of memory, defending the World Memory Championship 8 times with his self-created memory method. He accurately memorized the order of 54 decks of poker (2,808 cards) (only 8 were mistaken) and broke the Guinness Book of World Records.
Dominic O'Brien (Image: Worldkings.org)
But his reading comprehension ability is much lower than that of ordinary people. When reading, every word seems to jump out of the book, and he must read the words one by one with his fingers, otherwise it will be difficult to read. When listening to lectures, it is difficult for him to concentrate, and he will involuntarily desert...
This is actually the dilemma facing artificial intelligence at present: it is difficult to abstract and generalize. Perhaps it is we who sacrifice a part of our memory to have unique induction and abstract thinking.
However, "improving memory" is still our goal. So what are the types of memory we have? And what are some tips to help us remember things?
Classification of memory types: long-term memory and short-term memory
Memory capacity refers to the amount of information that can be maintained at the same time. If the memory capacity is exceeded, the information of the memory will be lost. In order to explore the limitations of human memory capacity, scientists have made unremitting efforts, but also let us have a more intuitive understanding of memory: our memory is divided according to the time scale, can be divided into short-term memory and long-term memory.
Short-term memory generally only lasts for a few seconds, memory capacity is very limited, the average person is about 4, and like "Charlotte Troubles" in the Ma Dongmei neighbor uncle can only remember two words in "Ma Dongmei", his short-term memory capacity is 2.
Image source: Screenshot of the movie "Charlotte Troubles"
If a piece of information is repeatedly remembered, it can be converted into long-term memory. The capacity of long-term memory is much larger than short-term memory, and the knowledge and skills we have acquired and past experiences are all long-term memory. Although it may also be forgotten, no significant capacity limitations have been found in long-term memories – they can accompany us until the end of life.
The transformation of short-term memory into long-term memory, and short-term memory is forgotten without being reinforced by repetition
(Image source: Adapted from opentextbc.ca)
What if I forgot? Then let the brain guess one!
In some memory experiments, even if participants did not remember the goal, the accuracy of completing the task was still higher than relying on random guesses. Further analysis found that the participants were able to guess the most probabilistic option based on past experience, improving the accuracy rate.
This strategy is called "usability heuristics," and the study of heuristics for human decision-making was first proposed by Herbert A. Simon and developed by two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
Heuristics take a practical approach or self-discovery to solve a problem, and are not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, logical, or reasonable, but will solve the problem quickly.
The premise of the heuristic is to acknowledge bounded rationality and not to seek the optimal solution but to seek the satisfactory solution. For example, given a novel in which the subject recalls which word begins with k and word where k is the third letter, most people think that there is more at the beginning of k, but in fact the latter is twice as much as the former. This is because it is easier to remember words that begin with k than words where k is the third letter. In short, your memory produces a biased sample of information. Heuristics are often a psychological shortcut that reduces the cognitive load of making decisions.
If you want to enhance your memory, try this method
Of course, memory can be enhanced through training. One of the more famous mnemonics is called the "Palace of Memory".
Start by imagining a familiar and detailed scene in your mind, such as the street you live on, and then bind the object you want to memorize to the location in the scene.
For example, memorize a string of words: bread, chairs, stones, cars, textbooks, glass, spoons, lamps, flowers, swords... You can put them on the streets you're familiar with: a big loaf of bread at the corner of the street; a chair at the entrance to the kindergarten around the corner; a stone at the bus stop...
The next thing to remember these words is that you just have to imagine you wandering through familiar streets and encountering these objects on the way... The power of the memory palace is that once the memory object and the spatial position are bound together, even if you disrupt the order of the memory objects, you can restore it according to the corresponding spatial position reference in the memory. Therefore, to build a memory palace, the key is to choose those eye-catching visual images to represent memory objects.
The process of building the palace of memory
(Image source: Adapted from ChessBase)
The principle of the memory palace needs to be further studied, and someone has proposed a possible explanation from an evolutionary perspective: the neurons that we remember things originate from the location cells used for spatial navigation, and it may be more natural to connect information and location to memory.
However, the memory palace also requires long periods of practice, and maintaining these memories also needs to occupy the cognitive resources of the brain.
In the Internet age, we can't and don't have to remember all the knowledge and what we see and hear, after all, the Internet can help us check it at any time, but we can't completely rely on the Internet and not exercise our memory.
1. Ma, W.J., Husain, M., Bays, P.M. Changing the concept of working memory. 2014.
2. Sims, C. R., Jacobs, R. A., & Knill, D. C. An ideal observer analysis of visual working memory. 2012.
3. Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
4. Gy rgy Buzsáki. . Oxford University Press.
5. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga. . BenBella Books, Inc. Dallas, TX.
Figureworm creative
Producer: Popular Science China
Producer: Xu Da
Unit: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Center of Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligent Technology
Producer: Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences
(The images indicated in this article are authorized)
The reproduced content represents the views of the author only
Does not represent the position of the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Source: China Science Expo
Edit: Herding fish