13 cool facts about how our memory changes over time

Tatiana Chernigovskaya, one of the most famous and respected scientists in the study of neuroscience, professor at St. Petersburg State University, claims that we are born with a powerful “computer” in our heads. But it is most likely impossible to fully understand its structure. How to explain or predict many things that happen to the consciousness and memory of a person during his life. But science does not stand still, and it is always curious to learn about new discoveries of scientists.

We have selected the most, in our opinion, amazing facts about human memory.

The human brain is a fantastic computer

If we talk about higher nervous activity from the point of view of cybernetics, then the “biological computer” is millions of times superior to the most powerful artificial intelligence. If we compare a person’s memory to a hard drive, then this is approximately 1 petabyte, or 1 million gigabytes. It’s like watching a video for millions of hours. At the same time, the brain spends only 25 watts of energy to process such a gigantic amount of information.

Every second, more than 100 thousand chemical reactions take place in the multilevel neural network of the brain, and the number of thoughts flying through the head per day can simply shock uninitiated people – this is several tens of thousands. Just think: a person forms from 25 to 50 thousand thoughts a day. By the way, more than half of them are negative.

The brain remembers absolutely everything

It’s hard to believe, but the brain is such a sensor that records absolutely everything that happens to a person: what it sees, hears, thinks, senses, feels. He has no filters – to fix this, but this is not. All information is “written”. If you ask us to remember how many cars we met on the way to work, we will never say for sure, because we simply did not pay attention to it. But our neural networks are not asleep – everything is recorded and hidden in various nooks and crannies of the brain. With us, memory, of course, plays bad games: we are sure that forgetfulness is a normal phenomenon, you cannot remember everything. But if we cannot remember something, this does not mean at all that “the files have been deleted from the computer.” There are many ways to prove this, one of which is hypnosis.

Memories are put together like puzzles

The main organ of the central nervous system is not a cabinet with shelves in which events from a lived life are hidden. Memory can be described rather as a process – its components are distributed in different parts of the brain, everywhere, and when you need to remember something, neural connections are activated and collect the memory into one picture.

But what is curious. According to neuroscientist Tatiana Chernigovskaya, the same thing cannot be remembered twice, because the second time you reproduce the last process of remembering. This file has already been overwritten and will do it again. In a word, memories are not the most reliable source of information, over time they fade, lose details, accents and even truthfulness, details appear that did not happen in real life.

Genetic memory exists

In academic science, it is generally accepted that the memory of ancestors does not exist, this is a pseudoscientific theory. It is impossible to keep in memory something that was not in your own life experience. Although the first to speak about the existence of genetic memory was the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung almost a hundred years ago. But recently, American scientists have proven the existence of ancestral memory: visions from the past can make themselves felt, for example, in a dream. 

Memory appears even in the prenatal state 

The first manifestations of memory can be observed in a newborn baby – he distinguishes the mother’s voice from other voices. Hearing develops at about the 24th week of intrauterine development, so the child, being in the mother’s belly, not only hears the mother’s voice, but also remembers it. Physiologically, from birth, a person has several types of memory – genetic, short-term, immediate and involuntary. Short-term memory can be destroyed by anesthesia, other actions aggressive to the brain tissue. The lifespan of such a memory is several tens of minutes. In the process of life experience, other types of memory are added.

Dreams are quickly forgotten due to short-term memory

When a person sleeps, his long-term memory is turned off, and short-term memory works. As a rule, dreams interpret the events that happened the day before. Therefore, dreams are quickly forgotten, but sensations from the seen unreal picture may remain – anxiety, recovery, joy.

Depression distorts memory

In a person suffering from psychological problems and disorders, the formation of nerve cells slows down. This is reflected in the memories – they are greatly distorted or disappear altogether. And there is a memory disorder – confabulation, in which real memories are changed to false ones. In this case, a person cannot reliably reproduce the events of his biography, he is confident in the facts that could not have happened to him, invented or dreamed of.

Gadgets damage memory

The paradox is that civilization, making life easier for a person, makes him weaker and more vulnerable. Numerous digital devices and devices, without which it is already impossible to imagine the modern world, affect our health and consciousness. In memory, the oversaturation of information and the unwillingness to train it reflected accurately.

“The memory of the ‘Google generation’ is worse than that of their grandmothers or even great-grandmothers, which is generally alarming. There is no need to remember: electronic calendars, any address – typed the first two letters of the last name, and it pops up to you. The navigator brings you home. That is, if we are not talking about the practical benefits, which, of course, is very good – to have a navigator, whoever argues there, but about the quality of brain activity, then this quality deteriorates, because he does not exercise. We have to do the same with the brain … what we do with the body, ”says Professor Tatiana Chernigovskaya.

There is a bug detector in the brain 

This phenomenon was described by Natalia Bekhtereva, a legendary scientist, neurophysiologist, and a major brain researcher. “These are structures that protect you from mistakes, for example, when you leave the apartment, they do not allow you to leave the possibility of fire in it. You are standing at the door, and it seems to you that you have forgotten something, only you do not know what, whether it is not a switched off iron, or gas, or keys. Forgotten keys are still cheap, or you have to look for who else has the keys, or break the door for a certain amount of money. When you are worried at the door, you have a choice: either go back and see everything, or say to yourself: “I’m right, I’m fine, I went.” Which of these two tactics is correct? If this happens to you rarely, it’s right to come back and check, this error detector protects you. “

It takes sleep for memory

The brain changes throughout a person’s life. But the more mental stress he experiences, the more he solves non-trivial tasks, the more he creates new neural networks – this is directly related to the structure and function of the main organ of the central nervous system. In other words, if you want to live long and not lose your mind, then read smart books, watch smart movies, solve problems, learn poetry by heart, think more. But we must not forget that memory also depends on a number of other reasons: proper rest and sleep, walks and physical exercises in the fresh air (they increase the stability of attention by 20 percent).

Sleep is very important: the fact is that the neurons themselves and special immune cells of the microglia monitor the “purity” of the neural pathways, they destroy unnecessary synapses (the place of contact between two neurons is needed to transmit a nerve impulse). During sleep, the memory is reformatted: from the short-term information is transferred to the long-term, the neural circuits are cleaned. 

Learning poetry is easier for adults

There is a common stereotype among adults that memory gets worse over the years. In childhood, they learned poems, memorized the rules, crammed textbooks, and now you don’t remember where you put the receipt from the housing office. But, as scientific experiments have shown, the ability to memorize information is higher in adults than in children. To learn a poem, a child must repeat it more times than an adult. But on the other hand, children keep what they have learned in their memory longer – the strength of memory is higher. But overall, memory quality does deteriorate with age. By the way, new words in the cortex of our brain hemispheres are recorded for about two hours. Words are easier to remember, the meaning of which is clear to us.

Negative emotions are better remembered

We remember not objective reality, but its subjective perception – the feeling with which we lived this moment. And, unfortunately, negative forces are stronger here than positive ones. If during the day you were in a good mood, but at the end something ruined it, this will go down in the annals of memory.

Deja vu is a memory game

You see a stranger, but it seems that you have already seen him once, you come to an unfamiliar place, but it seems that you have already been here. This phenomenon lasts a fraction of a second. There are many theories about the origin of déjà vu. For example, Sigmund Freud linked this with fragments of forgotten dreams, there is a version of genetic memory and even reincarnation. Other scientists explain déjà vu by a physiological process – a malfunction of the hippocampus, which is involved in the mechanisms of the transition of short-term memory to long-term memory. The famous neurophysiologist Natalya Bekhtereva answered questions about déjà vu in the following way: “This applies not only to the room: it may seem that the person has already seen, the situation has already happened, the words have already been spoken. This phenomenon is deja vue (deja vu – “already seen”), it is associated with the activation of the temporal lobes. During childbirth, sometimes the head shrinks, and the sections of the temporal lobes are damaged, they just suffer the most, and this is not compensated for in many people, so there are all sorts of things, deja vue is not the worst. “