Do you enjoy an iron memory or suffer from the scourge of forgetfulness?
Turning the house upside down in search of car keys just two minutes before leaving the house is a classic. Sometimes you try to focus, remember and review every second you passed the day before, and you certainly tried to remember the name of the hero of the movie you are watching with your friend, but to no avail.
These lapses worry many people, and memory disorders specialists know that there are people going to consult a doctor about whether these lapses are normal and should not be concerned about them?
The authors, Veronica Palomo and Andres Massa, in a report published in the Spanish newspaper “El Pais” Spanish causes of these lapses, identified:
It’s not about memory, it’s about attention Lack of attention is the cause of the most common misconceptions, and this reason is further increased in actions that are permanently repeated.
According to Javier Oltharan, director of the Memory Disorders Research and Treatment Unit at the Integrated Neuroscience Center, “the inability to remember where we parked the car or forget to talk during a conversation, doctors call it lapses of attention, not real memory shortages. That makes us panic. "
For this reason, when you have a place to store everything you use, it usually helps you avoid searching for keys every time you leave the house, for example.
Memories at the tip of the tongue The Battle of Oblivion is a classic, continuous battle, hoping that you will remember the word you are looking for at any time. But at the same time, you know that you have no choice but to accept your stalemate.
Harvard explains in its health blog that what happens is that there are other memories competing with the ones you are looking for. This phenomenon becomes more frequent with age and makes older people have difficulty remembering some names.
Interestingly, forgetting the names of people is very common because they exist at the end of our neural networks.
“Our minds are interconnected and made up of interrelated information models. This means that to reach names, we have to compete with a lot of relevant information, such as the physical features of the person with the name, something you said or did,” Olatharan explains. To a healthy brain. "
Memory failures There are people who pride themselves on having an iron memory. They have a great ability to remember past events as if they had happened the day before. But with some exceptions, they think so because they don’t realize that the details of their lives are incorrect.
If someone tells them that there are people, places, and dates with their stories that do not correspond to reality, they worry about their poor memory. However, from a biological point of view, it is likely that it is not wrong. The cognitive psychologist Ulrich Neisser is a natural memory failure.
One day, Nesser asked his students to write an event. Three years later, he asked them the same question.
The rest, while remembering important aspects such as the people with whom they occurred at the time of the event, changed the version considerably. As a result, “memory failures” increase with age.
The same event generates different memories In this case, the authors cite verses written by Ramon de Campoamor that “in a traitor world, there is no truth or lie, all according to the color of the glass you look at.”
In fact, these verses define the role our way of seeing the world plays by defining the content of our memory. If what comes to mind when recalling an experience is completely inconsistent with what someone else remembers, even though they have created their memories together, it is not worth finding the right party.
Nor is it worth visiting a neurologist, because the mood we experience and past experiences are just two aspects that cause information bias when the brain encodes memories.
Oblivion makes you remember better The fact that memory is temporary because people who remember everything except. In this case, there is no need to try to remember and know all the names, dates and events sometimes recorded by our brain. Some memories last longer, some less.
We can interpret this forgetfulness as memory failure, but scientists believe this mechanism is important because it helps to “clean the hard drive” of information that accumulates over time, allowing new memories to be stored.
Dementia or stress What worries us is that forgetfulness becomes very frequent, and one might think that it is in the early stages of dementia, but it is the result of stress.
Neuropsychiatrist Noemi Fernandez explained that “when there is atrophy in cells after amnesia, it means that the brain loses a gray or white substance and therefore, structures and synapses do not function properly.”
Studies related to the effect of lack of sleep on the disruption of the work of brain cells found that sleep deficit interferes with the ability of neurons to encrypt and store memories of the day at rest at night.
Source: Spanish Press