Your memory is rubbish
I have a terrible memory.
I forget the faces of people I’ve just met.
I forget the content of the books I read.
I’ve forgotten most of my childhood.
I forget where I was and what I did before I sat in front of this keyboard.
I’d forget my name if I didn’t have these shitty business cards cluttering my desk.
Unless you’re one of those photographic bastards we all secretly — and in my case openly — despise, then you’re just like me, and if you are like me you’re sick of your shitty memory.
My memory bothers me so much that I decided to Google ‘why can’t I remember anything?’ a few times and here’s some stuff I found that might help me, and I guess you, since you’re here.
1. Where are my keys?
An article in Scientific American told me that visual memory is our memory of images, like remembering the face of someone you just met or the time right after you look at it.
Short-term visual memories are stored in your brain alongside each other, just like files on a computer, and aren’t removed until your brain drags them into the recycle bin.
So basically, you have full access to all your short-term memories until — WHAM! They all piss off at the same time and you’re left with an empty head.
To bypass your visual short-term memory and store images in your long-term memory, the image must link to some pre-existing knowledge stored in your brain.
You have a better chance of remembering a new person’s face if they look like a relative or someone from your past. Or the person might have a big nose and you remember how people used to call you ‘Cock-nose’ at school and it made you cry.
2. What was in that book?
You probably can’t tell from the state of this article, but I read sometimes. I watch TV about 70 times as much as I read and play video games 70 times more than that, but I read.
Coincidentally, the writer of this article in The Atlantic also reads and decided to look into why people forget what a book says. She quotes this person, Pamela Paul, who said:
“I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object.
“I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember — and it’s terrible — is everything else.”
This type of memory loss is known as “the forgetting curve”. When you read or watch a TV show you retain most of the information in the first 24 hours and depending on how much you review it, it starts to decline rapidly.
The journalist then talked to this other guy who said that “the forgetting curve” is a result of the way we consume information these days.
This person, we’ll call him Jared Horvath, because that’s his name, has done some research. This research showed that recall memory is only useful for bar trivia and we now rely on recognition memory instead.
Recognition memory is remembering where information is stored instead of remembering the information itself. The internet works as an externalised memory as do books, movies and TV shows.
So how do we fix this? Horvath says people often shove more information into their brains than they can possibly hold. People who binge watch shows retain less information than those who watch an episode a week.
The bingers could recall more in the short term but lost that ability later on, unlike the casual viewers who kept hold of that information.
Therefore if you want to retain any of the crap you consume, whether it be TV, film, books or video games, you should space it out a bit.
Your brain has limits; don’t cram it with 16 seasons of The Real Housewives. Although that show has so little factual content your brain would probably have room to spare.
3. Was I ever born?
So we’ve discussed how to slot visual short-term memories into your long-term memory and how to replace your recognition memory with recall memory, but what about forgetting your childhood? Did you even have a childhood? As far as I can tell I came into existence this morning with a hangover and a fresh 10 hours clocked on my PS4.
I did a quick search on Google again and I found an article by someone who unashamedly refers to himself as Dr Karl, clearly trying to piggyback on Phil’s success. Dr Karl Kruszelnicki (not letting him get away with that ‘just Karl’ shit) says that growing children constantly develop new nerve cells in a process called neurogenesis and this includes those related to memory.
Throughout the first six years of your life your brain replaces old nerve cells with new ones and as a result you can no longer recall memories from those years.
HOWEVER, I read more than one article this time and found out that you might not be able to recall the memories, but the memories still exist inside the brain and have an effect on the person you become.
Professor Osman Skjold Kingo (or Professor Oz if pretension is your thing) did a test on 12-month-old babies which involved them meeting a researcher.
Once the babies grew into three and a half year old children Oz got them back into the lab and did a memory test. He showed them a video of the researcher who worked with them when they were 12-months-old standing alongside some random person the child had never met.
The children ended up focusing all their attention on the random person and this was significant in showing that they recognised the researcher.
Ozzy explains this by saying: “When the children steer their gazes away from the person they know, it suggests that they do not find that person to be particularly interesting, because they already know him, and then it is more interesting for them to focus on the other guy.”
So, your childhood memories are in your head somewhere, even if you can’t recall them; for all you know you were taken in as an orphan by your parents before you reached the age of six and they have hidden the truth from you. Go ahead, ask them, the lying bastards.
Conclusion
Well, I’ve explained three of the five things I mentioned about my terrible memory and that’s not a bad percentage.
The ‘forgetting where I was before I sat in front of this keyboard’ comment doesn’t require any clarification other than I’ve probably got that Alzheimer’s young people can get.
I obviously remember my name, it was just a gag and you should appreciate that I tried to make you laugh.
Bye.
