Ca parte a setului de procese cognitive elementare, memoria este responsabilă cu depozitarea, conservarea și refolosirea experiențelor noastre din trecut, ca materie primă, de cele mai multe ori, pentru procesele psihice superioare.
Who needs memory?
Napoleon said in his time: “Forgive your enemies, but do not forget their names”, bringing up an important first use of memory.
After all, all of society is built from the ground up on situations that call on our past experiences, experiences that have already been labelled by the brain and quietly stored somewhere on the inner shelves of the individual.
Basic skills that help us relate to our fellow human beings are useful in everyday life, to build healthy relationships and improve the quality of life. However, alongside this habitual use of memory, we are bombarded from childhood with information of questionable importance, which puts an artificial strain on memory.
Children, teenagers and young people are the first to be targeted for intensive memory use, and if we look at this from an age perspective, we would be tempted to think that the chronologically later generations, adults and seniors, should be concerned about memory capacity.
The truth is that, once we enter the workforce, we have a plethora of memory ‘aids’ at our disposal, from digital calendars to sophisticated notification systems, interconnected objects, integrated platforms and a host of other devices and software applications that will remind you of, for example, the date of a birthday you’d like to forget.
And just like that, you no longer have to remember when you have to leave for work, because Google sends you a notification on your smart phone letting you know that you have to leave home at 7 a.m. to get to the office on time.
ou don’t even have to remember your favourite restaurants, because smart apps that work with maps remind you which restaurants you’ve been to and what time of year.
The reliance on interconnected devices, networks and platforms to access your personal repository of information has its good parts, but also its less pleasant parts. We are helped more in our day-to-day activities but, unfortunately, we put less intellectual effort, with direct effects in particular on our mental health.
Now or later?
In terms of time, psychologists talk about three types of memory: sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory.
The acquisition and retention of information through the activation of the senses defines what is meant by ‘sensory memory’, where data retained through tactile, auditory or visual channels enters our mental system to be recorded for a short period of time.
The information obtained in this way is distinct from that obtained through ‘short-term memory’, sometimes also called ‘working memory’, which operates on information that is consciously stored by the individual for only a few minutes. By repeating this information, we help to move it into the sphere of “long-term memory”, the area of the brain responsible for labelling, categorising and storing human experiences.
In the final stage of the memory process, which is a semi-permanent stage, personal information is prepared to be stored for future use.
It is also in this area of long-term storage that we need to differentiate.
For example, the retention of information from a holiday spent in Greece is different from the mechanism by which the procedures for driving a car are stored in memory.
The adventures we had in the land of Greece are purely conscious, because we have made a deliberate effort to retain them and put them in the “pantry” of the brain, to be taken out of “storage” in the middle of a conversation with our friends, in which each of us tells about the places we have visited.
Driving, on the other hand, involves procedures that we retain unconsciously, after they have been repeated many times.
In the first case we can say that we are dealing with a form of explicit memory, while in the second case we can consider memory to be implicit.
If we reflect a little on the mechanics of the two types of memory, we might conclude that explicit memory feeds on emotions and affective reactions, while implicit memory involves movement and motor co-ordination.
It helps memory
It is obvious that each of us wants to improve our memory capacity, especially our long-term memory, as we are not particularly interested in retaining information for 4 seconds at most.
To do something about this, and therefore to increase our capacity to retain information, we need to make a conscious effort in two directions: stimulating the brain and maintaining proper nutrition.
We have established that memory is a psychic function, and to maintain it within its functional parameters, we must endeavour to provide the brain with the raw material it needs.
intellectual activities such as reading, learning or even playing certain games stimulate brain activity, helping to maintain or increase cognitive capacity.
laying chess on a regular basis, for example, stimulates the player’s explicit and implicit memorisation capacity through the need to constantly apply a set of abstract rules.
Playing games and mental exercise are extremely useful for cognitive development, but nutrition is at least as important, because we are talking about chemistry and substances that enhance chemical reactions.
Foods rich in omega-3s are memory’s best friend, but as our daily diets are suffering from 21st-century dietary deficiencies, nutritional supplements are here to make up for some of the shortcomings.
Optimal biotin, vitamin B6 and magnesium are the cocktail the human brain needs to achieve an ‘elephant memory’.