Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory

Where is My Mind?

• By one estimate, the average American is exposed to 34GB (or 11.8hr) of information a day
• Hermann Ebbinghaus “On Memory: A contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885) - tried to memorize trigrams, established the idea of a forgetting curve over time.
• In essence, neurons function like a democracy with alliances or “cell assemblies”.
• Somewhere is the brain’s speech centers a large coalition of neurons cases votes for “bath”, a smaller coalition votes for “path”, and an even smaller minority votes for other candidates. Within less than half a second, the vote is tallied, and ultimately the baby picks up that it is time for a bath. The connections between the neutaons that supported bath are strengthened, and connections with neurons that voted for the wrong sound are weakened. As those neurons settle into coalitions that differentiate between the sound the baby is hearing, they are becoming less sensitive to sound differences that don’t exist in that language. It’s as if the neurons are choosing between a small number of candidates based on a few key issues.
• The connections in your brain are constantly being reshaped with the goal of improving your perception, movement, and thinking as you gain more and more experiences. Moreover, as you go past simple perception (what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell) and move into higher-order functions (eg judgement, evaluation, and problem-solving), the brain is remarkably plastic, and the neural elections are highly contested.
• Interference - there is an intense competition between the coalition that has the memory you’re looking for and coalitions representing other memories you don’t need at that moment.
• The memories that are the most distinctive are the easiest to remember because they stand out relative to everything else.
• Attention - is our brain’s way of prioritizing what we are seeing, hearing, and thinking about.
• Intention - guide’s your attention to lock on to something specific.
• The prefrontal cortex:
  • I the “central executive” of the brain. Several regions all over the brain have relatively specialized functions, and the job of the prefrontal cortex is to serve as a central executive, coordinating activity across these networks in the service of the mutual aim.
  • Helps us learn with attention
  • Takes up about a third of the real estate in the human brain
  • Frontal lobotomy - removal of the prefrontal cortex - but rather than treating any underlying mental illness, it leaves patients in a zombielike state, apathetic, docile, and devoid of motivation.
  • The more numbers people had to keep in mind, the more activity was apparent in the prefrontal cortex - it plays a part in temporarily holding information.
  • People without a functioning prefrontal cortex could do fine when they were given clear instructions and no distractions, but they struggled when they had to spontaneously use memory strategies or follow through on a task when irrelevant things competed for their attention.
  • Is intensively activated when a person had to use intention to stay on task, focus on distinctive information, resist distractions, or initiate some kind of mnemonic strategy.
  • ADHD is associated with atypical activity in the prefrontal cortex.
  • As we get older, we can still learn, but we have more trouble focusing on the details we want to take in and we often end up learning things that might be irrelevant.
  • Certain part of the prefrontal cortex are thinned out, on average, in people who do heavy media multitasking.
• Use intention to guide our attention so we can remember what matters. Balance the needs of the experiencing self and the remembering self.