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MEMORY
by
Christine Hargan, BSc (Hons)
Psychology
www.psychologicalsolutionsforme.com
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Oh how many times have you wished
that you could remember?………….. Your memory is probably
not as bad as you think. Did you know that working
memory (sometimes called short term memory) has a
duration of just 10 seconds – so the next time you have
problems in remembering something don’t be so hard on
yourself - the simple fact is that the item simply
hasn’t yet reached your long term memory.
Did you know… the biggest cause of poor memory is worry
– fear, particularly amongst those of more mature years
that ‘you’re losing your marbles’. If you lack
confidence in your ability to remember things and worry
about your failures, the impression that you get, is
those failures are becoming more and more frequent.
Often the behavioural spiral that results is downward.
After all if you break the behaviour down to its base
level - worry is simply fortune telling – looking into
the future, but only at what can go wrong. If you’re
expecting bad things to happen / that is all you will
find. The result can fuel the mind to believe it’s
degenerating, driving it to look for more evidence to
confirm decline. If that sounds like you, simply
concentrate on all of the things that you have
remembered and you will find that as your confidence
increases so will your memory.
There are lots of ways of improving memory, the best one
for you depends upon the way you learn most effectively.
Some people learn by doing (experiential learning), some
by example – watching other people doing things, others
by lectures (theoretical learning) – documented cases
or, stories of what individuals, or companies people
have achieved. Can you think of any others?
Generally memory is improved by repetition, but how
things are repeated and retained is individual. Once you
are happy with your ability to memorise things you need
to be able to recall them. How many people I wonder when
asked how many days there are in the month of say
November? Recite 30 days have September…. Our parents
and teachers simply taught us mnemonics to help us.
Mnemonics are simply hooks that help us to retrieve
things from memory…
So how are your memories stored?
There are lots of theories on memory storage. I like to
think of the brain as a filing cabinet, filled with a
massive amount of information. It is separated into two
parts your long term memory (unconscious mind) holds all
the information that you really don’t consciously need
to access, to help you function, I like to think of it
in terms of ‘unthought known’s’, (a Freudian term I
believe). After all you don’t need to think about
functions such as breathing –you simply do it – if you
hadn’t learned that one, you wouldn’t be reading this!,
so the process is stored in your unconscious mind along
with lots of others, the memories of events in your
life, everything you’ve learned in your lifetime and new
skills.
Your working memory (conscious mind) holds a more
limited amount of information that which you are likely
to need to recall quickly, so it’s important to learn to
retrieve from your long term memory as we discussed in
the previous article. AND there are hundreds of methods
of retrieving information. The best method for you
depends upon your learning style. There are clues to
your preferred learning style in the words that you use
and the way that you behave – for example, when you get
a piece of flat pack furniture, do you read the
instructions? Or, where available would you prefer to
watch an instructional video? Some people prefer to just
unpack the carton and get stuck in. Other people take a
more balanced approach, and read the instructions, watch
the video, think about what can go wrong and why… and
after considering all of the repercussions, of their
actions – they go ahead, but worry about the amount of
time it has taken.
Once you have identified your learning style and memory
type you simply work with it to improve, your memory,
the way that you learn is important, because your
success, or not depends upon your approach.
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One of my favourite theories of memory storage is a
time-line, because it seems fairly straightforward,
essentially all of your lifetime memories are stored in
a line, starting at birth and stretching way ahead in
the invisible distance to the end of your life. Because
we are individuals each person has learned through trial
and error to code time. How we remember things is
individual. Some people can recall their memories using
all of their senses and as if they are in the cinema
with the events playing back to them, the people
involved seeming clear, other people recall without
vision, like story telling, other people recall by
straightforward dialogue. Some traumatic events may be
stored like a photograph, those are called flashbulb
memories.
The important principle in the theory is that many
individuals whose memories are not stored in a logical
fashion suffer from an assortment of issues, for
example, why do some people have trouble with spelling?
Simply some people don’t have their memories stored in a
logical manner. That being the case, they have to
re-learn the way a word is spelt each time they write
it. - one theory of dyslexia is that the sufferers have
memories that just float around in their mind, the
memory storage system simply lacks structure….. Just
think how reorganising your memory could help.
Other ways of helping us to remember, include hooking
onto things we have already committed to memory and the
sillier they are, the more likely you are to remember
them. If you wanted to remember a shopping list, you
could choose an automatic sequence of events like
getting up, so item one would be stopping you from
sitting on the edge of the bed, item 2 had to be moved
from your slippers before you put them on, 3 in the
sleeve of your dressing gown, 4 in front of the bedroom
door etc. When you want to remember the shopping list,
you simply recall the silly scenario of getting up.
When I used to work as an office based contractor –
before arriving at the office on the first day of the
assignment, I used to ask for a seating plan, so I knew
the names of colleagues–if it was a really large office,
I’d concentrate on the section in which I would be
working, first memorise the names if they were
multi-syllable giving each part really silly image then
their desk position, and on day one I could walk in and
know all of my colleagues’ names. Simple but effective.
Christine Hargan, BSc (Hons) Psychology; Specialises in
and treats the causes and effects of emotional
disorders, confidence and addiction based issues with
hypnotherapy, NLP and psychotherapy. For further
information
www.psychologicalsolutionsforme.com
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