Memory can be divided into different types. Peter Russell in his book, 'The Brain Book' describes 8 types of memories. Episodic memory: The memory for past episodes or events in one's life. Factual memory: The memory of facts such as July fourth is the Independence Day of America etc. Semantic memory: The memory for meaning. Elephant is an animal; Eagle is a bird. The average person remembers thousands of words and meanings. Sensory memory: Think of an image on a cinema screen. Your eyes are presented with a series of frozen images interspersed with short period of darkness; but what you actually see is a continuous image. To achieve this "persistence of vision", your brain must store the information until the next image arrives. A similar mechanism operates with hearing also. Even the simplest word consists of a combination of different sounds. Each is stored till the arrival of the next. The whole process lasts just a few tenths of a second. Skills: All skills also involve memory. A person remembers how to drive a car or how to drink. Instinctive Memory: Many memories are inherited and stored in genes. The newborn baby 'remembers' to suck at its mothers breast. Collective Memory: Carl Jung has suggested that we may also have collective race memories. Past Life memory: Some people are able to recall events from their previous berths. The memory by another classification is divided as sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory is also termed as working memory or recent memory. Recent memory is what enables us to hold a telephone number while we dial it, and even then we usually have to renew the trace by repeating to ourselves. This may last as little as ten seconds. Long-term memory is a ware- house in which information is stored for considerable periods. In order to boost the memory there are many techniques. Using your vision is brilliant for boosting your memory. About forty per cent of the brain is devoted to vision-more than any other function. If you can find a way to make something visual, it is bound to be remembered better. One of the best memory tools involves conjuring a visual memory of a familiar place such as your home, or garden. You then imagine each individual thing you want to remember and mentally place them in different locations within the familiar place. As you review what you want to remember -for example to buy vegetables and juice -you imagine each item at a specific position in your chosen place. Later, if you take a mental walk around your familiar place, you will find that you 'bump into' the things you need to recall. Gordon Rattray Taylor in his book, 'The Natural History of Mind' quotes Professor Ralph Norman Haber's experimental studies. Haber exposed two thousand five hundred and sixty slides showing a range of photographs to volunteers at the rate of one every ten seconds. The subjects were then shown two hundred and eighty pairs of pictures, one of which was drawn from the series already seen, the other similar in nature but unfamiliar. Asked to say which of the two was familiar, the subjects were right nine times out of ten. Even when the familiar pictures were shown reversed left-for-right scores declined only slightly. These results suggest, Haber comments: 'that recognition of pictures is essentially perfect. The results would probably have been the same if we had used twenty-five thousand pictures instead of two thousand five hundred'. Visual memory is one effective way to boost your memory. |
