It is often said that a person is the sum of all his memories. Your experiences determine the kind of person you are. Nevertheless, people often don’t know much about memory, which is why many people say they have a “poor memory”. This is partly due to the analogy that human memory is like a computer’s memory, which is much more complex and tricky than the memory components in laptops, tablets and cell phones. Here are 10 points from experts in memory psychology: 1, memory is not declining Everyone has experienced the embarrassment of not being able to remember something, perhaps a person’s name, perhaps the spelling of the French word “town hall”, or where their car is parked. So while it may seem obvious that memory is failing, like fruit rotting, the research does not support this view. There are many researchers who believe that in fact the capacity of memory is infinite and everything is stored in it, but without some repetition of rehearsal, the memory is less accessible. This means that it is not the memory itself that has become bad, but the ability to pick up memories that has gone awry. But what’s the point if the brain can remember everything but can’t recall most of it? Please read on. 2. Forgetting helps learning The concept of forgetting helps learning seems at odds with people’s intuition, but think of it this way: Imagine you create a brain that remembers and recalls every single thing. When this super brain tries to remember where you parked your car, it immediately recalls all the parking lots in its memory and then comes back to pick from them. Obviously the parking lot you want to recall is the most recent one you went to park in, and the same is true for most of our memories, where recent events are usually more important than events that happened long ago. In order to make your super mind faster and more useful in the real world, it is necessary to build some kind of system that ignores old and useless information. In fact, we all have a super mind with an ignoring system we call “forgetting”. That’s why forgetting helps you learn: when less relevant information becomes inaccessible, we naturally leave behind the information we need most in our daily lives. 3. “Lost” memories can be restored There is another side to the fact that memories do not decline, and that is that although some memories become inaccessible, they can still be activated. Even some things that are difficult to recall for a long time still exist in the memory waiting to be revived. Experiments have shown that information that has been inaccessible for a long time can still be revived, and we can reaccess this information more quickly than we can receive new information. This is like the fact that you never forget how to ride a bicycle, a fact that applies not only to cycling skills, but also to memory. 4. Recall changes memory Although this is the basic principle of memory, recall changes memory seems to be at odds with our intuition. How does this happen? When a memory is recalled, it becomes stronger compared to other memories. Let’s take an example: for example, you think of a birthday as a child, and you think of a Lego spaceship you got. Every time you think about this, the other things you got on that birthday become relatively weak. So the process of recollection is actually an active reconstruction of the past, or at least of the part of the past that you recall. But that’s just the beginning of things. There is a potential for false memories to occur in cases where recall goes awry. Indeed, psychologists have experimentally implanted false memories in people’s minds. This gives rise to the interesting idea that by choosing memories that we can recall, we can effectively shape ourselves. 5. Memories are unstable The fact that the simple act of recalling changes memories means that memories are relatively unstable. But people tend to think that memory is relatively stable: we forget what we have forgotten, and so we assume that in the future we will not forget what we know now. This means that students, and certainly not only students, tend to greatly underestimate the effort required to remember learning material. 6. Anticipation bias I’m sure everyone has experienced this: you have a great idea, you think you’ll never forget it, and you don’t bother to write it down. But within ten minutes you’ve forgotten it and it’s gone for good. We have seen the same scenario in the laboratory. 2005 Cowley Elliott and Bujock did a study in which people first learned pairs of words such as “bright light” and then asked them to estimate their own “bright” after the prompt Then they were asked to estimate how likely they were to associate the word “light” with the cue “bright”. Participants in the experiment were confident that the reason for this foresight bias was that they had been given the “bright” cue. Later, after they were given the word “bright,” a variety of words came to their minds, such as “bulb” or “shadow,” and the correct answer was not as easy to recall as they thought. The correct answer is not as easy to recall as they think. When something is easy to remember, learning is not as effective. When we can recall something immediately, we feel smart, and vice versa, we feel stupid. But in terms of learning, we feel just the opposite. When something comes to mind quickly, i.e., we don’t make an effort to recall it, no learning process takes place. But when we make the effort to bring something to consciousness, a cool thing happens – we learn something! When people’s memories need to be tested, the more effort they make to build and rebuild a certain target memory, the more profound that memory eventually becomes. This is where proper study skills always involve testing, because just eyeballing the information is not enough; learning requires effort to remember. 8, learning is heavily dependent on the occasion Have you ever noticed that what you learn on a particular occasion is difficult to recall when the occasion is changed? This is because learning has a lot to do with how you learn and where you learn, it depends on what people are around you, how the environment is and how you learn. In the long run, people learn best when they are exposed to certain information in different ways, or in different situations. If you want to learn to play tennis, should you spend one week learning to serve, then the next week learning to hit the forehand, then the next week learning to hit the backhand, and so on? Or should you learn a mix of these movements every day? Research has shown that mixed learning is more likely to be recalled in terms of long-term memory retention. The same goes for learning to drive a car as for learning to play tennis, and also for declarative memory, such as which city is the capital of Venezuela. The problem is that this method of learning is more difficult at the beginning. If you practice your serve and then immediately switch to hitting forehands, you “forget” how to serve, and you feel you might as well keep practicing your serve over and over again. But in the long run this mix and combination of learning works best. One explanation for this phenomenon is called the “reload hypothesis”. We need to “reload” our memory every time we change our movements, and it is this reloading process that reinforces the learning effect. 10, learning is under your control From the above facts about memory, it is realistic to conclude that we often underestimate our ability to control memory. For example, people often think that some things are inherently difficult to learn, and they choose to give up. However, some memory techniques such as using different occasions, changing actions and repeating memories can help retain memories for a long time. There is also a tendency to think that the past has been capped and cannot be changed, but how the past is remembered and viewed can be changed. Stimulating memories in different ways can help us reinterpret the past and move us into the future in a completely different light. For example, studies have shown that when people focus on positive things, they can get rid of painful negative memories. In short, our memory is not as bad as we think it is. Maybe it doesn’t work like a computer, but that’s all the more reason to be interested in understanding and experiencing it.