How Does Your Memory Work?
Psychology — By admin on April 9, 2010 at 8:41 pmYour memory charts every detail of your life, it shapes your identity, your memory is you. From birth, your brain has a remarkable ability. It interacts with your physical environment and is continually changed by the experiences you have. Consider on average the 58 holidays you will have taken, 1700 friends and acquaintances you will have made in your lifetime, 2100 books you will have read and the 5800 films you will have seen. What’s stored in your head is far more than a set of facts and figure, but the experiences that make up your life.
A really interesting documentary on the workings of the “self definition” memory of the human being. There are a few different areas to our brain that deal with memory like speech and language and short term memories like shopping lists etc. This documentary follows the lives of three individuals who have very different memory to our own.
Tags: Human Brain, Memory, Mind Power, Psychology
2 Comments
This documentary is amazing, thanks for posting it.
What I loved about this program was the ability for people to begin having self aware memory.
As an adult I always wondered why I was not able to remember back past 5 years of age.
I always wondered what my life was like during those first five years.
When my children began to be born I made a conscientious effort to write down all the important aspects of their day. I would combine these notes with photographs and samples of products we had used.
My goal was to record completely the first five years of their lives.
The effort of this project resulted in this fun book called:
Reid’s Adventures – 1st Year – Breaking in Your New Parents.
This book chronicled the first year of my son’s life. The first year he would never remember on his own.
This book would be followed with enough material for another 120 novels on the first 5 years of my three children’s lives … almost.
By the time my third child reached 2 ½ years my former spouse had had enough of my writing, picture taking and documenting of my three children’s lives. She sued for divorce, had me kicked out of the house, and then removed every single aspect of my life from the children’s lives so that they could not remember who their father was.
Then all of the work that I had done for my three children was destroyed, including their diaries, photographs, video tapes, and other memories.
Under no circumstances were they to be able to remember the first five years of their lives with their father.
Why would my former spouse do this?
Her mind is organized and trained to look only forward into the future and not into the past. Any memories from the past are irrelevant and burdensome. By destroying the memories of her children’s first five years, her thought process was to remove this unnecessary burden and distraction of having them to be able to read and learn about their past. From my former spouse’s perspective she was doing her three children a favor.
In Santa Clara family services in California the female case worker agreed. A father should not make memories for his children to enable them to remember their past. This includes diary stories, photographs, and saving other mementos. I have this written down in a family court document. I was told to stop and desist from all such activity or else I would never be able to see my three kids again.
It is unfortunate that women are like this, but I find that this is a familiar trait with most women. Watch women at a community park whose children are playing there. How many women are recording the activities of their children either through video cameras or photography so that their kids may remember these events later on in life just for fun. On average the percentage is 0%. For the most part mother’s are busy gossiping amongst themselves. For most adults the percentage is only 5%. I happened to be part of that 5% to my former spouse’s dissatisfaction.
Here is another observation that I have learned over the past few years with regards to mothers, fathers and their children. I specialize in saving the artwork of children and publish it so that they may enjoy it later on in life. There is no interest in human society to save this artwork. From mothers to fathers to governments all over the planet, there is no interest to save the artistic works of these young sentient beings who live in their country. I have found it very interesting on several levels that adults at all levels of society completely disregard the artistic and writing capabilities of their youngest citizens K to 12.
First memory recall – My theory
Based on my own ability to remember memories from only five years of age and forward, my theory was that children could only recall memories later in life only after they had learned to speak.
As a child I had a very difficult time learning how to speak because of a medical condition I had that impaired my hearing. This problem was diagnosed as adenoids that would simply not go away.
My hearing was finally corrected at five years of age and I was able to learn how to talk.
My earliest retrievable memories from youth start at 5 years of age. My theory is that long term memory retrieval in human beings is tied to the ability of a person to be able to speak a language. In this way a long term memory is stored in such a way that language can describe it. This allows the long term memory to be both retrieved visually in one’s mind’s eye and descriptively using language.
I have seen another documentary on language and memory recall. There is a woman in the amazon jungle who missed the opportunity to learn a language by age 7. Once this window passed she could not learn a spoken language. This inability has dramatically reduced here ability to recall long term memories.
Children have the ability to recall their earliest memories from the day they started to learn how to talk.
My youngest son will unfortunately never be able to recall his father as he was 2 ½ years old at the time of the divorce and unable to talk yet. Based on my theory of language being an instrumental factor in being able to recall long term memories or earliest memories.
Keep in mind that language is not required to store long term memories, just retrieve them.
Long term memories are always active in children as this is how they learn their mother’s face, smell, voice, their spoken language and their written language.
However from my own personal experience the retrieval of earliest memories is based on being able to talk. Once a person learns how to talk, a memory is then stored with language recall ability.
The researchers in this program however have a different view.
A child can recall his earliest memories once they are self aware.
This to makes perfect sense.
Perhaps it is then a combination of the two. A person being self aware and a person having learned a language.
Topics for future experimentation and study.
Arnold Vinette
Ottawa, Canada