Tips to Help Improve Your Memory

Tips to Help Improve Your Memory
To understand how memory might be improved, it is a smart idea to learn about how memory works and fails. A small structure in the brain called the hippocampus is the nerve center for memory formation. That’s where the crucial switching from short-term to long-term memory takes place through a process called “consolidation.”

Most memory diseases involve the steady deterioration of consolidation, so it may be easier to call on ancient memories and not be able to store any new ones. Can anything be done to enhance your ability to store memories?

Five tips that generally improve memory are:
1. Deal with stress. Continuous stress produces chemical by-products which inhibit memory.
2. Get enough sleep. Dream or REM sleep gives your brain the opportunity to process new information and consolidate learning.
3. Eat for memory. Certain foods are thought to improve memory performance. They include fish such as salmon and tuna, eggs, beef, chicken and bananas.
4. Exercise. Exercise can help your whole body work more efficiently. A short exercise break every 30 to 50 minutes can help push oxygen around your body and to your brain.
5. Drink lots of water or non-caffeinated drinks. Even a small degree of dehydration can reduce alertness. Some day you may use that glass of water to take a pill designed to protect your memory.

Research into drugs being used to treat memory difficulties found that by amplifying specific recep-tors in the brain, it may be possible to give memory a boost. For example, in developing treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and depression, Cortex Pharmaceuticals (AMEX:COR) has pioneered and is developing a new class of pharmaceuticals called AMPAKINE® compounds. These molecules amplify signals in the brain, like a hearing aid does for the hearing impaired, making it easier to encode new information.

While the goal of these drugs is to treat Alzheimer’s, depression and a variety of memory and cognition problems associated with neurological and psychiatric disorders—not to enhance normal memory performance— a lack of side effects found in experiments on mice indicates the drugs could be used that way in the future.

Early Phase 1 clinical trials in elderly subjects suggest AMPAKINE may have memory-enhancing characteristics which could benefit patients with mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease. The compounds may provide acute symptomatic relief for MCI and cognition.
Tips to Help Improve Your Memory

Herman Ebbinghaus

Herman Ebbinghaus
Herman Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), who originally trained in philosophy, suggested that: Mental states of every kind of sensations, feelings, ideas – which were at one time present in consciousness (but have now disappeared from it), have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.

In his book Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology (1885), he goes further: ....they continue to exist, stored up so to speak, in the memory.

So for Ebbinghaus , experiences never cease to exist, they just get ‘stored up’ in memory. He continues to explain in his book that there are three ways in which the memory store may be accessed.

First he describes voluntary access, in which we deliberately try to recollect images. Second, he outlines a recall that is ‘without any act of the will – images that are reproduced involuntary’. Third, he proposes that there is a type of recall that is obvious only because we are able to carry out some task or activity.

It is knowledge that is not conscious, yet produces effects that can be seen in everyday life.

One very important contribution that Ebbinghaus made to the development of memory research was the rigor in his methodology.

The experiments he conducted tested how humans learned to associate words together. He was more interested in the process of memory formation than the end result. For this reason he developed ‘nonsense syllables’, combinations of letter that had no existing associations.

His argument was that if he used words that already existed some of those worlds would be easier to recall than others because they would be well established in the memory storage.

For example, of a person was to see the word ‘cage’ and they owned a pet that was kept in a cage, they would be at a distinct advantage when it came to remembering this word. They could make a more meaningful association than someone who did not own such a pet.

This sounds like a very sensible approach to memory research - to use material that has no preconceived images attached to it.
Herman Ebbinghaus

Increase Observation Power

Increase Observation Power
To be able to observe better, you need to be attentive and focused. If you are not attentive, you can’t observant and if you are not observant you can’t have a good memory.

There are various ways to strengthen the observation. You can begin playing the memory games that are flooding the markets these days,

The games liked ‘jigsaw’ puzzles’ and ‘spot the differences’ are also very affective in increasing the power of observation.

Give yourself some simple observation tasks every day. For instance, if you are going for a party, observe the dresses worn by five people.

When you return home, try to recapitulate the details. Increase the number to ten, after a few days.

Similarly, while driving, when you halt at the traffic light you can try to observe the vehicles around you.

Note the kind of vehicle, the color and the make of the vehicle, the driver and the passengers. Try and recall these when you reach your office.

While shopping for detergents try and observe how many brands of detergents are available at the supermarkets, what is the difference on the packing, the prices etc.

These exercise will hone your observation within a few weeks.
Increase Observation Power

The Brain Size

The human brains weighs about 1400 g and is estimated to contain around 100 billion neurons, each of which connects with around 10,000 others in branching networks.

A great deal has been said about brain size and its relationship to mental capacity and intelligence.

The brain has long undergone the process of evolution. The brain has not only increased in size, but also in its level of organization, sophistication and complexity.

However, the increase size of the brain, not necessarily an indication of increased intelligence.

The absolute size of the brain has very little meaning, since an elephant’s brain is obviously very much heavier than that of any other mammal.

However, as a general rule, the bigger the animal, the bigger the brain. Its look like that the bigger the body requires a larger brain to control the larger muscles.

For comparative studies, a more meaningful ,measure has been used in which brain weight is related to body weight.

However, there is currently no general agreement about whether relative brain size can be correlated with intelligence or mental ability.

The weight of an elephant’s brain is only 0.2 per cent of its body weight. It turns out that of all the mammals, the tree shrew, a small mouse like anima of nor great distinction or intellectual or otherwise - has the biggest relative brain size, 3 per cent of body weight.

The size of the brain is independent of the stature of the individual; that the size of the brain is also independent of sex, although since the tine of Aristotle, it has been the custom to repeat that the female brain is smaller than that of the male.
The Brain Size

Constructing Memory

Constructivist approach describes memory as the combined influences of the world and the person’s own ideas and expectations.

Elaboration may take place during both encoding and retrieval. And it need not be an exact reproduction.

For example, the experience of each person while they are watching a film will be somewhat different because they are different individual. Drawing upon different personal pasts, and with different values, thoughts, goals, feeling , expectations, moods and past experiences.

Human memories are seldom precise representations or reliable replicas of past events Sometimes, they recall less than previously experienced because of some source of forgetting. At other times, however, memory may include even more information than human originally experienced when these memories first were formed.

But some times it might be associated with enhanced sensitivity for ‘false positives’, memory constructions that include new association that were not present in the original situation, as in false memories.

What ever it means, in general constructive memory is the utilization of one’s general knowledge to provide a more complete and detailed description of some remembered event or situation.
Constructing Memory

Frederick Bartlett

Frederick Bartlett (1886-1969) published a pioneering text entitled ‘Remembering’ in 1932.

It was groundbreaking because, unlike any of the aforementioned historical he suggested that recall is not just the reactivation of events from some sort of ‘storage bin’ but a whole new reprocessing in its own right.’

He argued that we use existing ‘structures of knowledge’ - concept called schemas, to help in the ‘reforming’ of the original memories. With this theory it has allowed for developing information processing theories.

Therefore our attitudes, expectations, belief and levels of motivation will highly influence the way in which we remember.
Frederick Bartlett

What is metamemory?

What is metamemory?
The term metamemory refers to knowledge of memory and memory process. It is knowing, for example, what one’s memory limits are, which memory strategies are more or less effective, and which memory tasks are more or less difficult. Memory also includes being able to plan and control memory process consciously as one in learning and remembering.

Metamemory is part of metacognition, knowledge the human mind and of the whole range of cognitive processes. The store of metacognitive knowledge might include an understanding that you are better at word problems than at math problems, that it is harder to pay attention to what are trying to learn when there is distracting noise in the background than when it is quiet, and that it is wise to check out a proposed solution to a problem before concluding it is correct.
What is metamemory?