There is no scientific evidence that the various vitamins, minerals, pills, and other supplements that are marketed as boosting your memory actually do so. They may be good for your health, and they are certainly good for the pharmaceutical companies that sell them, but that is all.
Memory is a complex phenomenon that affects many neural circuits in the brain. These circuits are strengthened by various types of neurotransmitters that bind to receptors, like keys that open locks. There have been many studies on substances that can slow the memory loss associated with certain degenerative diseases. But when you introduce an external substance into the delicate balance of your brain’s neurotransmitters, it is more likely to harm your memory than to improve it.
For example, caffeine acts as a stimulant by raising the level
of adrenalin in your body. In the short run, caffeine can
help you to concentrate. But in the longer run, it can also
cause anxiety and insomnia, both of which interfere with your
memory.
HOW EXERCISING YOUR MEMORY STRENGTHENS IT
To excuse their memory
lapses, people sometimes cite the saying, “Memory
is a faculty that forgets”. But there is really no reason
to be ashamed of forgetting things. Forgetting is a natural phenomenon.
It is even essential. In fact, the reason we forget is that our
brains are organized to eliminate anything that might clutter them
up needlessly.
We forget mainly those things that were not encoded firmly enough
in our networks of nerve cells. In this respect, forgetting differs
from amnesia, which is an
excessive memory loss due to a physical injury to the brain or
a psychological trauma.
There is no magic pill you can take to improve
your memory (see sidebar). But you can improve it in the following
two ways.
1) Adopt a healthy
lifestyle, and in particular get enough sleep.
Contrary to what you may sometimes hear, you cannot learn
new things while you are sleeping (for example, by listening
to an audio cassette). But you can more effectively retain
the things you learned during the day if you get a full
night’s sleep afterward.
Taking sleeping pills, however, will not help your memory,
because they reduce the time that you dream, and dreaming
is a phase of sleep that is thought to be very important
for memorization.
2) Do things
that exercise your memory.
For example, reading is an excellent way of exercising
your memory, because it makes you continuously apply your
attention and your visual perception, construct mental
images, organize information, and do other things that
are all essential for a good memory.
There is one form
of amnesia with which all of us are familiar, because we
all experience it every night: the kind that happens when
we are asleep! While we are sleeping, many things are going
on, not only in our external environment but also in our
inner world (for example, when we have dreams or nightmares,
or walk or talk in our sleep). However, most of the time,
when we wake up, we have no recollection of these activities.
We are even so used to this phenomenon that if we cannot
recall what happened during some part of the day, we are
often inclined to wonder whether we had simply fallen asleep.
TYPES OF AMNESIA
Amnesia is a major memory loss, greater than the simple forgetting
that occurs normally in everyday life.
Amnesia can affect some areas of memory while leaving others
intact. For example, it often erases memories of the recent past
while leaving those of the distant past better preserved. Memories
of habits (procedural memory) are usually better preserved
than memories
of facts and events.
Another kind of amnesia that many
of us have experienced is the kind that follows surgery under
general anesthesia. For such anesthesia to be considered
successful, the patient not only must have no reaction to
the operation or to any pain involved in it, but also must
not even remember any pain or other events that occurred
during it.
ANTEROGRADE AND RETROGRADE AMNESIA
When
someone suffers an accident that results in amnesia, the
first thing the doctors try to determine is whether the
memories lost are of information learned before the accident,
or afterward.
If patients can
no longer recall events from their lives before the injury,
they are said to have retrograde amnesia.
But if they can
no longer acquire new memories from the time of the accident
onward, then they have anterograde amnesia.
Anterograde amnesia leads to some
strange situations. People who have it forget their doctors’ names
and, every time they see them, greet them as if they were meeting
them for the first time.
These people must use all kinds of strategems to lead an apparently
normal life. For example, they may carry around a little notebook
in which they write down what they do every day, so that if anyone
asks them about it, they can give some kind of an answer. But
if, for example, they go to a play and write down its title,
when they read it back, they will not have the slightest recollection
of whether it was any good.
Various forms of amnesia can selectively
affect various types of memory, which can be classified
according to their duration or the
type of information to be recalled.
Another way of classifying memory is according to whether
it concerns things that happened in the past (retrospective
memory) or things that you need to remember that are going
to happen in the future (prospective memory).
Retrospective memories can be either semantic
or episodic. Prospective memories also can be
divided into two types: the kind that are triggered by a
time cue (for instance: “Remember to go to the doctor’s
at 8:00 AM”) and the kind that are triggered by an
event cue (for instance, remembering to mail a letter when
you are walking past a mailbox). Event cues need not have
any direct connection with the thing that you want to remember,
as witness the classic example: tying a piece of string around
your finger, then associating it with something that you
have to do later on.
