How do I make my brain stronger

How can you train your memory?

Status: 05/28/2020 5:29 p.m.
If a name doesn't come to mind right away, it helps to deal with something else first.

What we experience or learn: Our memory remembers a lot of it. But by no means everything and not forever. The brain sorts. The older we get, the more we have to do for our memory.

Only relevant things remain in the memory

A soccer team during weekly training: What the players will remember is only a small part of what actually happens on the soccer field. Because our brain specifically selects what it stores and for how long. The striker on his way to the opposing goal absorbs various impressions with his senses at the same time: a bird flying past, a dog barking, a whistle, the smell of sausage, the distance to the goal, the position of the teammates. His brain initially stores everything in ultra-short-term memory. But only relevant information is transferred from there to short-term memory, the rest is immediately deleted. Motor skills have to be practiced, for this the brain forms a memory, says memory researcher Prof. Jan Born from the University of Tübingen. But certain moves and standard positions, for example, have to be learned explicitly.

Sort in your sleep

Only during sleep does the brain decide what is transferred from the short-term memory in the hippocampus to the long-term memory in the cortex. Information such as movement sequences and moves are firmly internalized. Brain waves show these activities during the deep sleep phase of test subjects in the sleep laboratory. The information is then sorted and consolidated during sleep. However, content can also be falsified during sleep. This is because our memory is stored in a network of around 200 billion nerve cells. Coupled neurons in different regions of the brain store the memories. It can happen that similar memory contents influence each other. Our brains also better remember moments associated with positive emotions. A football victory, for example, could be remembered better than a defeat.

The brain's "storage disks"

In order to understand how we memorize things, one also has to know the different "storage disks" in the brain:

  • Sensory memory: In the sensory memory (ultra-short-term memory) information that we hear or see is stored for a short time. For example, we can understand connections in conversations. If this data is not retrieved or rated as relevant within a very short period of time, it is deleted again immediately to make room for new information. What is of interest comes into short-term memory.
  • Short term memory: Information is stored in short-term memory for seconds to minutes. Short-term memory is important, for example, in order to know where we have put the car key and who to call back. Few of the information goes into long-term memory.
  • Long-term memory: Information is permanently stored in long-term memory. Long-term memory distinguishes between declarative and implied memory: declarative memory stores information that can be consciously accessed, such as childhood experiences (episodic memory) or vocabulary and professional knowledge (semantic memory). Information in implied memory can be accessed unconsciously: we do something without thinking about it. This includes motor processes such as swimming and cycling.

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Arte | Xenius | 05/28/2020 | 4:50 pm