Health Report: Memories are made of this
The human brain - and the seemingly limitless memories it stores - is both fascinating and complicated. So, asks NICOLA GILL, how exactly does your brain sort, retrieve and lose the billions of experiences that make up a human lifetime?
Pause for a moment and conjure up a memory that's pure
pleasure. Maybe it's the last time you were by the sea, or when
you shared a fantastic experience with a loved one or were at a
joyful wedding. Allow it to linger in your head and develop. As the
memory unfolds, you will
also recall the emotional quality of the occasion, maybe the noises
and smells that accompanied it, the weather that day and other
details. If you really concentrate you can virtually replay the
whole experience like a 3D film with added sensory input in your
head. Powerful memories like these define us, glue us together and
also - when they are negative - torment us, enrage us and remind us
why we no longer speak to certain people or do certain things.
On a mundane everyday level, they mean we don't have to
re-learn how to brush our teeth or make a cup of tea every time we
wake up. Indeed, as the eminent neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga
poetically said, "Everything in life is memory, save for the
thin edge of the present."
At the most basic level, memory can be divided into short-term or 'working' memory and long-term memory. "Working memory could be likened to the RAM capacity of your desktop computer," says Dr Jonathan Foster, memory researcher and senior neuroscientist at Australia's Edith Cowan University. Like the text temporarily put in the memory of your computer's 'copy' and 'paste' buttons for as long as it takes to complete that particular task, it does the day-to-day job of holding enough information to allow you to complete the job in hand. It's why you don't (on the whole) forget where you intended to go as soon as you get in the car or who is about to pick up the phone after you dial a number.
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