12 Steps to a Better Memory

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STEP 1:Understand How Memory Works Whether it's the date of your spouse's birthday or where you left the keys to your car, nothing is more frustrating than not being able to remember something. Forgetting may also have more serious consequences, as when you can't remember information for a test or forget an important business appointment.Before getting into a discussion of how to improve your memory by learning new behaviors and memory strategies, it's a good idea to have an idea of how we form and recall memories in the first place.Memory is really not so much a retrieval as it is an active construction. If you say that you know something, you're really speaking metaphorically -- you're assuming that you can construct the answer. Contrary to beliefs in past centuries, memories do not exist as fully formed bits of flotsam in your brain.Where Is Memory?At present, the seat of memory cannot be found in any one place in the brain. Instead, scientists believe memory actually functions on a much more basic level -- the level of synapses scattered in weblike patterns throughout the brain. In fact, scientists don't really make any distinction between how you remember and how you think. No one completely understands either process. The quest to discover how the brain organizes memories and where those memories are acquired and stored is a continuing challenge for brain researchers.In order to study memory, traditional researchers have used drugs or surgery on animals to affect parts of the brain, and then applied behavioral tests to measure those effects. These experiments have shown that memory is a biological phenomenon with its roots firmly in the senses -- sight, sound, smell, touch, kinesthetic, and so on.How Memories BeginThe latest research suggests that memories begin with perception. If your earliest memory is of nestling in the arms of your mother, your visual system identified the attributes of objects in space: "This shape is Mother's face, this shape is a sweater, this is its color, this is its smell, this is how it feels."Each of these separate sensations then travels to the part of the brain that integrates the perceptions as they occur into a single, memorable moment, binding them into the experience of being held by Mother. The brain then consolidates information for storage as permanent memory. Thus, memory and perception are intertwined in a subtle and unbreakable bond that unites all of our experiences.However, it is possible to speak of visual memory and verbal memory as two separate things. About 60 percent of Americans have a visual memory, easily visualizing places, faces, or the pages of a newspaper. The rest seem better able to remember sounds or words, and the associations they think of are often rhymes or puns.How Memories Are RecordedUnderstanding the link between memory and perception provides only part of the picture. While memory does indeed begin with perception, many researchers believe that memories are recorded by electricity. Nerve cells connect with other brain cells at junctions called synapses; the cells fire electrical signals to each other across these junctions, which triggers the release of brain chemicals. The human brain contains about 10 billion of these nerve cells joined by about 60 trillion synapses.The wispy tips of the brain cells that receive these electrical impulses -- the dendrites -- seem to play an important role in memory. It is suspected that when an electrical impulse reaches a brain cell (perhaps carrying the information of a seven-digit phone number), the impulse compresses the dendrite. When the dendrite springs back into its usual shape, the electrical pulse disappears, along with the phone number. This, then, could be the mechanism of short-term memory.Most scientists believe that memory occurs as a result of functional changes in synapses or dendrites caused by the