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“In order to remember the new, you must first forget the old,” psychologists say, based on recent research. What else did they decide to surprise us with?
First, the memory must be “turned on”
It turns out that mere attention is not enough to remember something for a long time. The memory must be turned on. When people don’t wait to be tested, they can forget new information in a second, even if they just listened to it carefully. “It is believed that if we have already paid attention to something, then we will remember what interested us in all the details. Our experiments have shown that this is not always true. We found that when a person does not expect to be tested, he often does not remember anything – even in the most general terms, ”says one of the authors of the study, Dr. Brad Wyble (Brad Wyble). But if we know that there is a test to be done, memorization goes 2-3 times better.
H. Chen, B. Wyble «Amnesia for Object Attributes: Failure to Report Attended Information That Had Just Reached Conscious Awareness», Psychological Science, 2015.
Classical music improves memory
Listening to classical music increases the activity of genes associated with learning and memory, and at the same time reduces the activity of genes associated with neurodegenerative processes. This conclusion was drawn from a study that showed how music affects gene transcription (the process of protein synthesis) throughout the human genome.
C.Kanduri et al. «The effect of listening to music on human transcriptome», 2015.
Daytime sleep improves memory by five times
A nap of less than an hour can improve memory by 5 times. Two groups of subjects were given the task of memorizing pairs of unrelated words. Then the first group went to sleep for 45-60 minutes, and the second group went to watch the video. After a test was carried out, it turned out that the participants in the first group forgot significantly less new information.
S. Studte et al. «Nap sleep preserves associative but not item memory performance». Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 2015.
A. Lieri “Where is our memory? The art of remembering”
We use memory in every moment of our lives. Waking up in the morning, we realize who we are and what we need to do, because it is embedded in our memory. Thanks to her, we can work, dance, write and just talk.
Free up space by getting rid of unnecessary memories
After we dump unnecessary (yet) information into the archive, we remember it worse, but we remember new things better. Probably, knowing that the information is securely stored, the brain frees up resources for other tasks. “We usually think that forgetting is the result of memory malfunctioning, but scientific evidence shows that forgetting is vital for proper memory and thinking,” said study leader Benjamin Storm (Benjamin Storm).
B. Storm, S. Stone «Saving-Enhanced Memory: The Benefits of Saving on the Learning and Remembering of New Information», Psychological Science, 2014.
Remembering one thing, we forget another
Scientists have long assumed that memories can “compete” with each other for memory resources. Now their guesses were confirmed: a special brain scan was carried out. The authors of the study believe that competition for memory resources is a very useful mechanism that allows a person to select the desired memory from a number of similar ones.
M. Wimber et al. «Retrieval induces adaptive forgetting of competing memories via cortical pattern suppression», Nature Neuroscience, 2015.