Memory Surprises

Introduction

Have you ever wondered why some things are easy to recall, while others need hours of study? For example, you might be able to recollect what happened at your birthday party without any practice, but you need hours of study before you can recite a few lines for a theater play. Our mind stores and remembers information in fascinating ways. Remember to do this activity and you will be surprised at what your memory can do for you!

Background

You might have noticed that the human memory often fails to produce an exact replica of what was, but it excels at creating a reconstruction or interpretation. If you hear a story or explanation, you quickly pick up the essence of it. Your mind jumps in to classify, label, fill in, or even distort details so the story or explanation makes sense to you. It makes connections to knowledge that is already in your memory. That interpretation can be stored in your memory and is rather easy to recall, much easier than remembering an exact copy of the story or explanation you heard. It takes a lot of effort to store an exact copy so that you can reproduce it later.

There might be a reason why nature has evolved in such a way. This flexible method of storing information allows us to more easily combine separate ideas and make connections, or to recognize the known in unknown situations. We can change our viewpoint and change how we remember things accordingly. It seems like our memory is designed so we can easily use and generalize memories from the past to plan and do better in the future—a valuable survival skill! Being able to remember exactly what happened, or what was said, read or heard might not be as important for survival.

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Observations and Results

Was it hard to accurately remember the details of an object you see frequently? Were you convinced ‘sleep’ was a word that appeared in the list? If that was the case, you are like most people. Our memory rarely produces an exact copy of what was. Rather, it reconstructs what was, while keeping what our mind identified as the essence intact.

Your memory stores enough information to easily recognize objects you see or use frequently, as that is all you need to perform well in daily tasks. Unless you paid very close attention to the details at some point in the past, your memory did not store them, and you cannot recall them when asked to make a drawing. If you compared your drawing with the real object and identified the details that were distorted or left out, you will probably remember more details the next time you draw this object. Paying attention in a meaningful way helps build memory.

The test with the ten words also shows how our memory is good at recalling the general idea— the concept— but not the exact words. Did you notice that all the words in the list revolve around the concept of sleep? The mind picks this up and remembers it, and, when asked later, it is convinced sleep was part of the list.

More to Explore

• Study Skills Science: Investigating Memory Mnemonics, from Scientific American
• Sentient Skills Science: What Makes Some Memories So Memorable?, from Scientific American
• Science Activities for All Ages!, from Science Buddies

Credits