We all must have known people who can recall details, dates, every major event in history, political science, science, day to day life in their lives. These people can describe a scene as though driven by a photograph. Such people seem to have mastered their minds and memories. They usually are skilled storytellers. I have seen just a few elderly people who recognize their colleagues, peers, assistants instantaneously when they meet them after decades.
There is a tendency to overdo and reconstruct memories to make them more interesting and thus easier to recall. Despite frequent rehearsal, some people have better memories simply because they encode more information in the first place. Memory is essential to all our lives. Without a memory of the past, we cannot operate in the present or think about the future. We would not be able to remember what we did yesterday, what we have done today, or what we plan to do tomorrow. Without memory, we could not learn anything.
There are moments when your memory fails you pitifully. In a meeting, you try to recall somebody’s name, a date, a reference and you don’t remember there on the spur of moment. Moments like these may lead you to believe that you have a “bad” memory, or are already showing signs of aging and memory loss. However, the human brain is an incredibly complex and mysterious machine, and our powers of memory are some of the most enigmatic elements within it.
How Do We Form Memories?
Before we can understand what makes a memory “good” or “bad” or “ugly”, we should understand how memories are formed in the first place. Due to the incredible amount of information that we take in every day, an efficient system is required for us to exist, form memories, think logically, make connections, and a thousand other things we do naturally take for granted. The process of memory formation is therefore broken down into three steps: Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval.
Encoding
Encoding occurs when we take in sensory input and change it into a form that the brain can handle; these three types of encoding are visual, auditory, and semantic (meaning in language). For example, if you attend a meeting and like someone presenting a point very well, you will encode the memory as auditory. You see an old friend of yours in a crowded market after ages, immediately few memories gush within you, you run towards him and hug him this visual encoding. While walking in the market you listen to a much-liked song by you in the past of Lata Mangeshkar, you just stop to listen to it, listening to the song you feel very delighted this is an acoustic encoding(auditory).
These encoded pieces of information are then moved to your short-term memory (STM), where they can last for 0-30 seconds unless they are rehearsed or consolidated into long-term memory. Memory association is dependent on the passage of time; the longer you actively hold a piece of short-term memory, the more resistant it becomes to competing stimuli or other factors that can simply wipe your slate clean. When encoded memories are stored in the short-term memory, those memories can only be placed in 5-9 “slots”. However, memory can also be “chunked”, a way of bypassing this low limit for the amount of “things” we can remember at any one time.
Storage
If information is deemed “important” or “meaningful”, then it will be shifted into our long-term memory. Repetition and rehearsal are critical at this stage; the more you interact about an incident with others, the better chance it will have of entering the long-term memory.
Long-term memories last for a much longer time as compared to short-term memories and have unlimited storage capacity. Long-term memories are encoded in three ways. The capacity of long-term memory depends on the way it is encoded and the number of times it has been assessed or recalled. Psychologists brand long-term memories as recent and remote. It’s surprising to know that babies enjoy a dramatic increase in their ability to remember people and things between 8 and 12 months of age. That’s really astonishing.
We retain different types of memories for different lengths of time. Short-term memories last seconds to hours, while long-term memories last for years. We also have a working memory, which lets us keep something in our minds for a limited time by repeating it. Whenever you tell a phone number to yourself over and over to remember it, you’re using your working memory.
Retrieval
Recovery of memories is the final aspect and is often the hardest one to explain. Depending on how the information is organized, either naturally or intentionally, it may be easy or quite difficult to retrieve. Long-term memory is best triggered through association, such as hearing a lovely song from long ago that takes you back to a crystal-clear memory of events the song is associated within your life.
Why Do We Forget?
There are four main causes behind our “forgetting”, which leads so many people to doubt themselves and surrender to having a “problem with memory” for the rest of their life. Particularly for short-term memories, if the information is not regularly rehearsed or returned to, the memory fades, never having made it to our long-term memory. Some information that we take in, even repeatedly, isn’t stored because it isn’t essential to the memory or meaning itself. For example, a road because of cleanliness on and beautiful trees planted on both sides of it, you might even remember a bakery in central of the road, but you might not remember the turn you need to take to reach a particular office on that road. That part of the information was less relevant and thus didn’t make it to long-term memory. Our memories need to be distinct in order to remain clear and neatly organized. When similar memories, places, faces, names, and experiences are all stored together, it can be difficult to separate them into distinctly different packets. For example, for a professor, remembering the names of roll numbers of students of one batch becomes difficult. Similarly, detailed events of one family reunion over another, when they were held at the same place with the same family members, would be more difficult than if the reunions were held in a different location each year.
Motivated Forgetting
Some things that we experience are either consciously or unconsciously forgotten, particularly if they are painful or traumatic. While these events may make their way into our long-term memory, through the acts of conscious suppression we are able to baffle or fully “forget” these memories. There are ways to access these memories, such as hypnosis, but the concepts of suppression remain controversial in the psychological field.
Genetic advantage
Some of the processes of remembering are within our control, and some are not. Similarly, there are some natural factors that can lead to a person possessing a stronger memory, as well as some nurturing elements of our cognitive development, training, childhood upbringing, and attention faculties that can help to boost our memory, even later in life. We see many individuals predisposed to having an incredible memory. The concept of having a “photographic” memory has been widely studied, and it is found that some people do have amazing powers of recall over events that emerged years or decades earlier. I have seen some young men remembering flight numbers, hotel room numbers, names of the chefs and waiters in the hotel, teachers’ names from kindergarten class… In one large-scale study, it was found that people with such heightened episodic memory (a condition termed “highly superior autobiographical memory” or HSAM), do have enlarged areas in the temporal and parietal lobes, both of which are linked to memory storage and retrieval. This gives such people an increased organizational capacity; in the same way, some people are able to memorize thousands of digits of pi in a matter of hours.
Generally speaking, studies have found that certain genes affect the density of dopamine receptors in the brain; dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps us to recall episodic memories from the past. In the study, those with certain gene activations enjoyed a higher density of dopamine receptors in the hippocampus, and also had stronger powers of recall as they aged.
